The mission was successful, and Dimorphos’ orbit was shortened by 33 minutes in the weeks after the impact.
However, a team of high school students led by teacher Jonathan Swift at Thacher School in California have discovered that Dimorphos’ orbit continued to shrink by another minute more than a month after the collision.
‘The number we got was slightly larger, a change of 34 minutes,’ said Mr Swift. ‘That was inconsistent at an uncomfortable level.’
Asteroid 2021 JA5 is around the size of 81 bulldogs, the symbol of the college football team of the University of Georgia. But it won’t hit us – hopefully the Bulldog team will have better luck.
An asteroid discovery algorithm—designed to uncover near-Earth asteroids for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s upcoming 10-year survey of the night sky—has identified its first “potentially hazardous” asteroid, a term for space rocks in Earth’s vicinity that scientists like to keep an eye on.
The roughly 600-foot-long asteroid, designated 2022 SF289, was discovered during a test drive of the algorithm with the ATLAS survey in Hawaii. Finding 2022 SF289, which poses no risk to Earth for the foreseeable future, confirms that the next-generation algorithm, known as HelioLinc3D, can identify near-Earth asteroids with fewer and more dispersed observations than required by today’s methods.
“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” said Rubin scientist Ari Heinze, the principal developer of HelioLinc3D and a researcher at the University of Washington.
A meteor has exploded over the Atlantic Ocean with the force of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s one of the ways that civilisation as we know it could end, with an asteroid impact sending the human race the way of the dinosaurs. It’s a terrifying prospect, and the film Don’t Look Up with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio really didn’t help matter with its demonstration of the paralysis and greed which could doom humanity.
Most Americans favor NASA’s focus on deflecting asteroids to protect Earth rather than pursuing lunar and Martian exploration.
In a galaxy not so far away, most Americans are casting their eyes on the skies, but not necessarily on the Moon or Mars. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center has unveiled that most Americans are more concerned about the threat of potential asteroid impacts on Earth, urging NASA to deflect these space intruders rather than diverting its resources to lunar and Martian exploration.
The survey, conducted among over 10,000 individuals, offers an insightful glimpse into the public’s views on space exploration, NASA’s role, private space companies, and the United States’ position as a leader in space.
Italy’s Campi Flegrei is showing some troubling early warning signs, but scientists caution that its eruption is far from certain.
When will an asteroid hit Earth and wipe us out? Not for at least 1,000 years, according to a team of astronomers. Probably.
Either way, you should get to know an asteroid called 7482 (1994 PC1), the only one known whose orbital path will cross that of Earth’s consistently for the next millennium—and thus has the largest probability of a “deep close encounter” with us, specifically in 502 years. Possibly.
Published on a preprint archive and accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal, the paper states that astronomers have almost found all the kilometer-sized asteroids. There’s a little under 1,000 of them.
Suppose a large inbound asteroid were discovered, and we learned that half of all astronomers gave it at least 10% chance of causing human extinction, just as a similar asteroid exterminated the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect humanity to shift into high gear with a deflection mission to steer it in a safer direction.
Sadly, I now feel that we’re living the movie “Don’t look up” for another existential threat: unaligned superintelligence. We may soon have to share our planet with more intelligent “minds” that care less about us than we cared about mammoths. A recent survey showed that half of AI researchers give AI at least 10% chance of causing human extinction. Since we have such a long history of thinking about this threat and what to do about it, from scientific conferences to Hollywood blockbusters, you might expect that humanity would shift into high gear with a mission to steer AI in a safer direction than out-of-control superintelligence. Think again: instead, the most influential responses have been a combination of denial, mockery, and resignation so darkly comical that it’s deserving of an Oscar.
Read More: The Only Way to Deal with the Threat from AI.
Using Zoonomia’s data, researchers have also constructed a phylogenetic tree that estimates when each mammalian species diverged from its ancestors5. This analysis lends support to the hypothesis that mammals had already started evolutionarily diverging before Earth was struck by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago — but that they diverged much more rapidly afterwards.
Only the beginning
The Zoonomia Project is just one of dozens of efforts to sequence animal genomes. Another large effort is the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP), which aims to generate genomes for roughly all 71,000 living vertebrate species, which include mammals, reptiles, fish, birds and amphibians. Although the two projects are independent of one another, many researchers are a part of both, says Haussler, who is a trustee of the VGP.
After lightning struck a tree in New Port Richey, Florida, a team of scientists from the University of South Florida (USF) discovered that this strike led to the formation of a new phosphorous material in a rock. This is the first time such a material has been found in solid form on Earth and could represent a member of a new mineral group.
“We have never seen this material occur naturally on Earth – minerals similar to it can be found in meteorites and space, but we’ve never seen this exact material anywhere,” said study lead author Matthew Pasek, a geoscientist at USF.
According to the researchers, high-energy events such as lightning can sometimes cause unique chemical reactions which, in this particular case, have led to the formation of a new material that seems to be transitional between space minerals and minerals found on Earth.
