Asteroids are objects of obvious scientific interest, not only for their intrinsic properties but also our need to understand how we can change their motion in space in case one looks like it will come dangerously close to Earth in the future. OSIRIS-REx is extracting all kinds of valuable data from asteroid 101955 Bennu, but we should also keep in mind that Bennu itself is a potentially hazardous object, with a small chance (1-in-2700, according to current estimates) of striking the Earth between 2175 and 2199. Thus the second 'S' in OSIRIS, which stands for 'security', and is all about measuring the factors that affect the object's trajectory. When we get samples from Bennu, we'll have a better idea about the asteroid's chemistry and morphology, useful for understanding the early Solar System as well as assessing how hazardous such an object is. But we need to know more, which is where NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission comes in. Here the purpose is planetary...

The latest operations of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft at asteroid Bennu remind me how powerful a wave we've unleashed in the coupling of robotics and ever more capable spacecraft components. We're not exactly at the stage of 'routine' asteroid missions, but Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx when seen in the context of upcoming missions like NASA's DART experiment and the European Space Agency's Hera are part of our renaissance of this class of object, with results beneficial to science but also practically useful in terms of future impact mitigation. More on DART and Hera tomorrow. Small objects have plenty to say about our future in space, and I haven't even mentioned Lucy, which will be studying multiple Jupiter trojans, or the Psyche mission targeting what may be the exposed core of a planetary embryo, or for that matter, the remarkably successful Dawn, which unlocked so many mysteries at Vesta and Ceres. It goes without saying that having an operational spacecraft in the Kuiper Belt is...

The oldest preserved impact structure on Earth appears to be at Yarrabubba in Western Australia, where a magnetic anomaly about 20 kilometers in diameter has been interpreted to be a remnant of an original impact crater 70 kilometers across. Here, what had been an approximate age of 2.65 to 1.075 billion years has now been constrained to 2.229 billion years, making Yarrabubba 200 million years older than the next oldest impact. A team led by Timmons Erickson (Curtin University) analyzed the minerals zircon and monazite at the site. Their sample showed shock recrystallization (in the form of so-called neoblasts) from an asteroid strike, the analysis of which allowed them to pin down the structure’s age. A paper just out in Nature Communications reports on the team’s use of uranium-lead (U–Pb) dating to investigate the age of the shock features and impact melt. A global climate change may have occurred as a result of this impact, perhaps one with consequences for so-called ‘snowball...

The holiday season seems an appropriate time to thank not only my Centauri Dreams readers for their continued high level of discussion in these pages, but also the army of citizen scientists who are out there working on everything from exoplanet detection to asteroid mapping. We saw recently how valuable the work of amateurs like Thiam-Guan Tan can be in confirming a possible exoplanet, while projects like the Habitable Exoplanet Hunting Project continue coming online to push the boundaries of what amateur equipment can do. Now comes word of the signal contribution made to OSIRIS-REx and its mission to asteroid Bennu. You'll recall that when the spacecraft arrived at the asteroid, the surface was found to be far more littered with rocks and boulders than anyone had foreseen. Finding a spot for landing and retrieving samples would be no easy task, but it was made substantially more manageable by a team of 3,500 people using their PCs to join in analysis and characterization of the...

What appears to be an interstellar comet is heading into the Solar System, with perihelion likely on December 10 of this year, a date that could change as orbital parameters continue to be firmed up. The natural comparison is with 'Oumuamua, first discovered two years ago and now well on its way out of the system. But the object first labeled gb00234 and now carrying the provisional name C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), while clearly on a hyberbolic orbit, has been found before perihelion and should be visible for a much a longer period of observation and orbital calculation. Image: Observations suggest that comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) may be from outside the Solar System. A hyperbolic solution for the object first labeled gb00234 passes between Mars and Jupiter. (Green=gb00234; Blue=Neptune). Credit: Tony873004 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. A professional optician and astronomer named Gennady Borisov at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory (near the Crimean city of Bakhchysarai, on the Crimean...

We have two stories with good news on the asteroid impact front this morning. The first, out of the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, is the announcement of the detection of a small asteroid prior to its entering the Earth’s atmosphere. That many not sound unusual, but this is the first time an object could be detected in time to move people away from a impact site, even though asteroid 2019 MO was only about 4 meters across and burned up in the atmosphere. The key is warning time, and here that time would have been half a day. An impactor like the 20-meter object that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013 could, with these same methods, be detected by the ATLAS facility at Maunaloa (Hawaii) several days before impact. ATLAS is made up of two telescopes, one on Hawai?i Island, the other 160 kilometers away at Haleakal?, Maui, providing whole-sky scans every two nights. About 100 asteroids larger than 30 meters in diameter are discovered by the facility every year....

Ever since the passage of interstellar interloper 'Oumuamua, we've become aware of the opportunities presented by objects entering our system from interstellar space, at the same time wishing we had the resources at hand to investigate them close-up. Andreas Hein and colleagues at the Initiative for Interstellar Studies have examined the possibilities for reaching 'Oumuamua through Project Lyra (see Project Lyra: Sending a Spacecraft to 1I/'Oumuamua), a study that also takes in the kind of future infrastructure that could allow us to react to the next such object. Now comes the interesting news that the European Space Agency is developing a mission called Comet Interceptor, one capable of visiting a long-period comet coming into the inner system from the Oort Cloud, but just as capable of reaching an interstellar visitor. The idea revolves around not a single spacecraft, but a combination of three. The composite vehicle would be capable of orbiting the L2 Lagrange point 1.5 million...

I've argued in these pages that the interstellar effort will be driven as much by planetary protection as by the human exploratory impulse. I count the latter as crucial, but we often think of planetary protection as an immediate response to a specific problem. Let's place it, though, in context. Now that we're actively cataloging asteroids that come near the Earth, we have to know how and when to react if what looks like a dangerous trajectory turns into a deadly one. That mandates a continued level of observation and progress on mitigation technologies. A small nudge counts for a lot with an object that's a long way out, and we can't exclude, for example, long period comets in our thinking about planetary protection. So mitigation strategies that begin with changing the trajectory of a small, nearby object will grow with our capabilities to encompass more distant options, and that incentivizes the building of a defensive infrastructure that can operate deep into the Solar System....

'Hyperactive' comets tend to call attention to themselves. Take Comet Hartley 2 (103P/Hartley), which was visited by the EPOXI mission (formerly Deep Impact) in November of 2010. Three months of imaging and 117,000 images and spectra showed us just how much water and carbon dioxide the little comet was producing in the form of asymmetrical jets, a level of cometary activity that made the comet, in the words of one researcher, 'skittish.' It was, said EPOXI project manager Tim Larson at the time, "moving around the sky like a knuckleball." Image: Comet Hartley 2, in every sense of the term a moving target. Credit: NASA. Nor is Hartley 2 alone. Scientists had a good look at comet 46P/Wirtanen from the SOFIA airborne observatory [Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy] last December. Here again we see a pattern of hyperactivity, with a comet releasing more water than the surface area of the nucleus would seem to allow. The excess draws on an additional source of water vapor in...

The approach of the asteroid 99942 Apophis in April of 2029 offers an opportunity to study a sizeable asteroid through both radar and optical telescopes. Marina Brozovi?, a radar scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, points out that radar studies of the object might resolve surface details that are no more than a few meters in size. No surprise, then, that Apophis is the subject of much discussion at the 2019 Planetary Defense Conference in College Park, Maryland. This is the same conference at which NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine warned about the critical nature of planetary defense, noting the Chelyabinsk event in 2013 that delivered some 30 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. NASA has contracted with SpaceX to provide launch services for its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which is expected to launch in 2021 via a SpaceX Falcon 9 and test asteroid deflection through high-speed collision. DART’s target will be the tiny moon of an asteroid called Didymos,...

This morning’s entry resonates with Jim Benford’s recent work on objects that are co-orbital with Earth (see A SETI Search of Earth’s Co-Orbitals). You’ll recall that Benford argues for close study of co-orbitals like Cruithne (3753), a 5-kilometer object with closest approach to Earth of 0.080 AU, and 2010 TK7, which oscillates around the Sun-Earth Lagrangian point L4. A number of other such objects are known in a 1:1 orbital resonance with Earth, but they are seldom studied or even mentioned in the literature. Calling for SETI observations at radio and optical wavelengths, as well as lighting up the objects with planetary radar, Benford gives a nod to Ronald Bracewell, who speculated that one way for an extraterrestrial intelligence to study a stellar system would be to plant a probe within it that could inform the home civilization about events there. The Earth co-orbitals are made to order for such observation, so why not give them a look with all the tools in our SETI arsenal?...

Do we have a second interstellar visitor, following on the heels of the controversial ‘Oumuamua? If so, the new object is of a much different nature, as was its detection. In 2014, a meteor north of Manus Island, off the coast of Papua New Guinea produced a powerful blast that, upon analysis, implied a ? 0.45m meter object massing about 500 kg. Events like this, not uncommon in our skies, are cataloged by the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS); this one shows up as being detected at 2014-01-08 17:05:34 UTC. Image: This gorgeous wide-angle photo from the 1997 Perseid shower captures a 20-degree-long fireball meteor and another, fainter meteor trail in a rich area of the northern summer Milky Way. Showers like these are predictable, but could some solitary fireballs mark the end of a meteor with an interstellar origin? Credit & Copyright: Rick Scott & Joe Orman. Now the CNEOS catalog, which covers the last three decades, is useful indeed, for it takes advantage of detectors...

Putting a crater on an asteroid is no small matter, for it allows us to gather samples to further nail down the object's composition. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has achieved the feat on asteroid Ryugu using the Small Carry-on Impactor (SCI) carried by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Confirmation of the crater and details about its size will be forthcoming, but fortunately the spacecraft’s DCAM3 camera was able to record the event. Following Hayabusa2 on Twitter (@haya2e_jaxa) is often the best way to keep up with operations at Ryugu (even as @OSIRISREx puts you inside that mission). The fact that we have two spacecraft in current operations around asteroids should be cause for continuing celebration. From the Hayabusa2 Twitter feed: [SCI] The deployable camera, DCAM3, successfully photographed the ejector from when the SCI collided with Ryugu’s surface. This is the world’s first collision experiment with an asteroid! In the future, we will examine the crater formed and...

The odd lightcurve of the star known as VVV-WIT-07, discussed here last Friday, reminds us that even as we start seeing such signatures, we are tuning up our ability to find others. It's a point that bears repeating from the paper on this work: ...surveys like ours, apart of course from its irregular cadence, may perhaps not have found objects like WIT-VVV-07 more often primarily because they were not looking specifically for this kind of variability. The authors go on to say that next generation surveys like LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), now under construction, as well as space-based assets like the upcoming WFIRST and PLATO missions, will likely pin down further instances of unusual light curves. It's a point worth making again when we pivot to today's discussion, on the asteroid known as (6478) Gault, a 4 kilometer-wide object currently some 344 million kilometers from the Sun. What we see here are two dusty tails reminiscent of a comet that are streaming behind Gault,...

We know by now to expect surprises when we do something for the first time with a spacecraft. The latest case in point is OSIRIS-REx, which has revealed multiple unexpected facets of the asteroid Bennu, near which it has been operating since December. Consider the surface of the asteroid, a key factor in how the mission goes forward since this is a sample return mission, and that involves finding a place relatively free of surface debris from which to take the sample. The problem: This smallest body ever to be orbited by a spacecraft turns out to be strewn with boulders. The original sample collection plan -- christened Touch-and-Go (TAG) -- will have to be altered, for it was dependent on a sample site with a 25-meter radius free of hazards. The OSIRIS-REx team has been unable to identify any site that meets those requirements. A new type of candidate site will have to be found, demanding higher performance using an updated sampling approach called Bullseye TAG that will be tailored...

Dust rings in the Solar System are of interest because they offer clues about the formation of the planets, as well as allowing us to contrast our own circumstellar dust with what we see around other stars in varying stages of planetary development. Recent work out of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center offers a dust ring with a difference from others we've found in our own system. Scientists have traced a dust ring near the orbit of Venus, and it's one with origins different than the dust that occurs in Earth's orbit as well as dust found near Mercury. Explaining what is going on in Earth's orbital path has us resort to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where the collisions of small objects create a steady source of dust. The material drifts gradually toward the Sun, but some of it, moving near the Earth, is drawn into our planet's orbit. A surprising amount of dust falls to Earth each day (one recent estimate is fully 60 tons of the stuff), and the mechanism seems a...

Tuesday’s post on asteroids and what it would take to deflect or destroy one has been usefully reinforced by a new paper from Mike Nolan (Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona) and colleagues, who discuss their findings in Geophysical Research Letters. Here we’re looking at observations of the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu, both archival (extending back to 1999) and current, drawing on the OSIRIS-REx mission. You’ll recall that OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer) is in operation around the asteroid, its observations helping us understand the object’s rotation, structure and composition, with a sample return planned for 2023. The Nolan paper fills us in on observed changes in rotation, which are apparent on the order of about 1 second per century. The asteroid’s rotation is speeding up. Exactly what’s going on here is something we can hope OSIRIS-REx can help nail down. One possibility is a process...

If we were to find an asteroid on a trajectory to impact the Earth, what strategies would we use to stop it? Recent work from Johns Hopkins University shows that there is a wide range in our thinking on what happens to asteroids under various mitigation scenarios. Much depends, of course, on the asteroid's composition, which we must account for in our models. A good thing, then, that we are supplementing those models with sampling missions like OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa-2. Let's look at the JHU work, though, which updates earlier results from Patrick Michel and colleagues, reported in a 2013 paper; the latter had considered the 5 km/s head-on impact of a 1.21 km diameter basalt impactor on a 25 km diameter target asteroid, with a model varying mass, temperature and material brittleness. Michel's work showed evidence that the asteroid being targeted would be completely destroyed by the impactor. What Charles El Mir and colleagues at Johns Hopkins have been able to show is that other...

For those of you who’ve been asking, I think the best way to keep up with the Hayabusa2 mission to asteroid Ryugu is via Twitter, @haya2e_jaxa. The news continues to percolate via websites and various publications, with a sustained ripple when the spacecraft successfully tested its sample mechanism and touched down on the asteroid. I’ll remind you too that the mission team now offers updated systems information in English on its Haya2NOW page for obsessives like me who want a really fine-grained look at what’s going on. Hayabusa 2 is once again at what JAXA calls its ‘home position’ about 20 kilometers above the asteroid as the multi-part sample selection process continues. JAXA’s news release on the touchdown was to the point: National Research and Development Agency Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) executed the asteroid explorer Hayabusa2 operation to touch down the surface of the target asteroid Ryugu for sample retrieval. Data analysis from Hayabusa2 confirms that the...

Sometimes one mission crowds out another in the news cycle, which is what has happened recently with OSIRIS-REx. The study of asteroid Bennu, significant in so many ways, continues with the welcome news that OSIRIS-REx is now in orbit, making Bennu the smallest object ever to be orbited by a spacecraft. That milestone was achieved at 1943 UTC on December 31, which in addition to the upcoming New Year's celebration was also deep into the countdown for New Horizons' epic flyby of MU69, the Kuiper Belt object widely known as Ultima Thule. Image credit: Heather Roper/University of Arizona. I suppose the classic case of mission eclipse was the Voyager flyby of Uranus, which occurred on January 24, 1986. I was flying commercial students in a weekend course four days later in Frederick, MD and anxious to hear everything I could about the flyby, its images and their analysis, but mid-morning between flights I learned about the Challenger explosion, and the news for days, weeks, was filled...