New Count of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

A New Count of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

May 16, 2012:  Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. Also known as "PHAs," these asteroids have orbits that come within five million miles (about eight million kilometers) of Earth, and they are big enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale.

The asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission, called NEOWISE, sampled 107 PHAs to make predictions about the population as a whole. Findings indicate there are roughly 4,700 PHAs, plus or minus 1,500, with diameters larger than 330 feet (about 100 meters). So far, an estimated 20 to 30 percent of these objects have been found.

In this simulated view of the near-Earth asteroid population, potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) are denoted in orange. Less dangerous near-Earth asteroids are blue. Earth's orbit is green. [more]

While previous estimates of PHAs predicted similar numbers, they were rough approximations. NEOWISE has generated a more credible estimate of the objects' total numbers and sizes. Because the WISE space telescope detected the infrared light, or heat, of asteroids, it was able to pick up both light and dark objects, resulting in a more representative look at the entire population.

"The NEOWISE analysis shows us we've made a good start at finding those objects that truly represent an impact hazard to Earth," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters. "But we've many more to find, and it will take a concerted effort during the next couple of decades to find all of them that could do serious damage or be a mission destination in the future."

This orbit diagram illustrates the difference between a PHA and less hazardous near-Earth asteroids (NEA). [more]

The new analysis suggests that about twice as many PHAs as previously thought reside in low-inclination orbits, which are roughly aligned with the plane of Earth's orbit.

"Our team was surprised to find the overabundance of low-inclination PHAs," said Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Because they will tend to make more close approaches to Earth, these targets can provide the best opportunities for the next generation of human and robotic exploration."

The NEOWISE analysis suggests a possible origin for the low-inclinaton PHAs: Many of them could have originated from a collision between two asteroids in the main belt lying between Mars and Jupiter. A larger body with a low-inclination orbit may have broken up in the main belt, causing some of the fragments to drift into orbits closer to Earth and eventually become PHAs.

The lower-inclination PHAs appear to be somewhat brighter and smaller than other near-Earth asteroids. The discovery that PHAs tend to be bright says something about their composition; they are more likely to be either stony, like granite, or metallic. This type of information is important in assessing the space rocks' potential hazards to Earth. The composition of the bodies would affect how quickly they might burn up in our atmosphere if an encounter were to take place.

"The NEOWISE project, which wasn't originally planned as part of WISE, has turned out to be a huge bonus," said Mainzer.  "Everything we can learn about these objects helps us understand their origins and fate."

The NEOWISE results have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

SOURCE: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/16may_pha/

On May 17, 2012 there were 1287 potentially hazardous asteroids.

Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters:

Asteroid	Date(UT)	Miss Distance	Mag.	Size
2012 JU	May 13	0.5 LD	--	10 m
2012 KA	May 17	0.6 LD	--	8 m
2010 KK37	May 19	2.3 LD	--	31 m
4183 Cuno	May 20	47.4 LD	--	5.7 km
2012 JV11	May 22	6.7 LD	--	69 m
2002 VX94	May 26	72.8 LD	--	1.1 km
2002 AC	Jun 16	62.2 LD	--	1.2 km
1999 BJ8	Jun 16	68.8 LD	--	1.1 km
2005 GO21	Jun 21	17.1 LD	--	2.2 km
2003 KU2	Jul 15	40.3 LD	--	1.3 km
2004 EW9	Jul 16	46.8 LD	--	2.1 km
2002 AM31	Jul 22	13.7 LD	--	1.0 km
37655 Illapa	Aug 12	37 LD	--	1.2 km

Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach.
SOURCE:http://spaceweather.com/

Comet Elenin Losing Global Panic Impact As It Falls Apart.

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Near Earth Objects Such As Asteroids. Could We Deflect Them? Or Would We Become Extinct?!

Will We Be Able to Deflect an Earthbound Asteroid?

Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries Staff Writer

Date: 16 August 2011 Time: 12:19 PM ET

Artist's concept of a catastrophic asteroid impact with the early Earth. An impact with a 500 kilometer (310 mile) diameter asteroid would effectively sterilize the planet. The Earth may have experienced such gigantic impacts in its youth, but fortunately today there are no projectiles this large to threaten our planet. CREDIT: Don Davis/NASA  View full size image

For any single human being, there are bigger things to worry about than death by space rock. For the long-term survival of humankind, on the other hand, asteroids pose a real danger.

A 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck off the coast of present-day Mexico 65 million years ago induced ecological changes that wiped out the dinosaurs. Inevitably, an Earth-shaking chunk of space debris will strike again.

Will it be too late by then?

However, so many earthly worries exist that a cosmic one which, at any given moment, is infinitesimally small doesn't garner much attention — or government funding. Several scientists who study asteroid hazards agree: Humankind probably won't start readying its planetary defenses until we know the danger is real. We'll need evidence that a large asteroid is actually headed here. [When Space Attacks: 6 Craziest Meteor Impacts on Earth]

It depends. "Human beings can solve any technical problems that are put in front of us," said Daniel Durda, senior planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and an expert on asteroid collisions. "It's the social and political issues that we struggle with." Rusty Schweickart, former NASA astronaut and founding member of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the Earth from asteroid strikes, concurred: "The geopolitical realities are daunting. The technical issues are easy by comparison."

The asteroid Apophis was discovered on June 19, 2004. It will fly within 18,300 miles of Earth on April 13, 2029, but poses little risk of impact.
CREDIT: UH/IA

View full size image

The main culprits

Though we know very little about the composition of asteroids — necessary information for determining their masses, and knowing how to knock them off course — we do know where most of the large, nearby rocks actually are. NASA's Spaceguard Survey tracks the paths of all near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) in Earth's neighborhood that are larger than 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter. [The 7 Strangest Asteroids In The Solar System]

Knowing an asteroid's location is step one in determining if it's on a crash course for Earth, and fortunately, none of the big ones pose a threat at this time. If one of these known asteroids were found to have a greater than 1 percent chance of striking Earth, astronomers would figure it out at least a decade beforehand.

"A large impact of something 1 km across — that's a bad enough scenario that it would motivate people to take this seriously," Durda said. According to Clark Chapman, another senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, the international community would probably band together and plan a mission to divert the path of the asteroid. "This would probably require matching its orbit with a series of spacecraft equipped with bombs," Chapman said. Getting the deflection mission off the ground would cost on the order of $10 billion.

Though we don't have all the technology worked out yet, we do know how to build nuclear devices, and we have already successfully sent spacecraft to and from asteroids. "A decade out, given the technology it would take to do a deflection, I think we could respond in time," Durda told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

David Morrison, interim director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and an expert on impact hazards, thinks we might need more time. He believes it would take two missions to deflect an asteroid. The first would rendezvous with the target asteroid and figure out what it's made of, the second, which would be specially tailored to the asteroid based on the first mission, to knock it off course. "One decade would be the minimum, but that would mean sending the deflection mission before we had characterized the target, which would be a bit risky. Twenty years is more realistic as a minimum," Morrison wrote in an email.

Schweickart says 15 years of warning of a coming impact would be a safe bet. Along with the time it takes to assemble a launch vehicle, launch, fly to and rendezvous with an asteroid, you also need "time enough for the deflection itself to accumulate enough change in the [asteroid] orbit for it to miss the Earth impact. Post deflection will require anywhere from say 3 to 10 years for the orbit change."

Smaller targets

There are dangers involved with asteroids under the 1-kilometer threshold, however.

"Anything more than 300 to 400 meters (983-1,312 feet) in diameter can cause continental-scale damage," said Stephen Wolters, a research fellow at Caltech who studies near-Earth asteroids at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA has begun locating and tracking smaller asteroids, but there are thousands still at large. If one of these were on course to strike Earth, sky surveys would give us no more than a month of warning. In that case, said Morrison, deflection is probably not an option. Instead, "you respond more like the way we handle hurricane warnings," evacuating people from the area most likely to be struck.

Eventually we will track all asteroids larger than about 200 meters (656 feet) wide. The day scientists realize that one of these mid-size rocks has a chance of hitting us, and that we have enough time to do something about it, serious political strife will likely ensue, the experts say. [Will Asteroid Apophis Hit Earth in 2036? NASA Rejects Russian Report]

Uncertainties abound

"If we had a decade of warning on a smaller-scale asteroid, 200 meters across, I think that's down in the area where we would be much more prone to arguing about possibilities and we wouldn't actually respond to it," Durda said.

Such an asteroid collision probably wouldn't cause a global catastrophe, just a national or continental one, he explained. This means that perhaps not every country would care to pitch in to deflect it, and others might be opposed to any action if it puts them at greater risk.

"The big challenge will be the international implications of where it will occur, what the range is — usually orbital uncertainties mean there's a track across the Earth where it's most likely to hit," he said. "Then, if you decide to deflect the asteroid, where does that track move across the Earth's surface before movingoff the surface? Now you're taking an act of God and turning it into an act of litigation, where you've moved the impact point potentially into countries that had been safe."

He continued, "It's these very issues that will lead to all kinds of discussion and argument and inherent delay in taking any physical action."

Given orbital uncertainties, another issue is how probable an impact must be before we decide to take action. "The world economies cannot afford to protect against all low-probability hazards," Chapman said. A 1-in-1,000 chance of a collision, for example, will probably be ignored, and according to Schweickart, they already are. "There are already some near-Earth objects with impact probabilities greater than 1-in-1000 and no one is the least excited," he wrote in an email. A 130-meter-wide NEA called 2009FD, for example, has a 1-in-435 chance of impacting Earth in the year 2185.

"For [the case] of a 500-meter-wide near-Earth asteroid, at a probability of more than 1 percent, I think we would take the threat very seriously," Morrison wrote. "Below that I don't know."[The Greatest Mysteries of the Asteroid Belt]

Out of left field

There's one form of cosmic debris that no amount of international cooperation can do much about.

"There's always a possibility of a long-period comet coming from nowhere and giving us almost no warning," Wolters said. Not only do such bodies come from the outer reaches of the solar system, where we can't see them, "these comets can come from high inclination orbits where we're not looking for things. You might only have a few months notice."

Fortunately, experts estimate that long-period comets comprise only about 1 percent of all the space rocks that pass by Earth. "The good news is that they're only a tiny fraction of the overall hazard," Durda said
http://www.space.com/12645-asteroid-deflection-doomsday-earth-capability.html

Is Comet Elenin Going To Be An Extinction Level Event? ...Or Will It Take More Than One Of These Objects? Part 1 of 3

What's the real story with Comet Elenin? Here is a diagram of the sizes and distances of the listed space objects below it. I know it may be small because of the numbers of objects and distances from Earth. Let's start with the technical stuff regarding these space objects.

Although this graphic isn't the easiest to see, here is the data, including dates for the comets and asteroid possible E.L.E.s in the upcoming months.

• Earth - 7,900 miles in diameter

• Asteroid 2005 YU55 -574 feet in diameter -191,084 miles from Earth - nearest Earth November 8, 2011, 47,773 miles between this asteroid and the Moon at its nearest to Earth trajectory

• Moon - 2,158 miles in diameter - 238,857 miles from the Earth to its Moon

• Comet Honda - 1749.7 yd diameter - 5,592,340 miles from Earth - nearest Earth Mid-August 2011-.26 the distance from Earth to Elenin at its nearest to Earth trajectory

• Comet Elenin - 124,274 miles diameter - 21,375,169 miles from Earth - 89.5 x distance to Moon - 16 x size of the Earth 

• Sun - 864,938 miles diameter - 92,955,825 miles from Earth

Diameter Comparison

574 feet - Asteroid 2005 YU55

1749.7 yd - Comet Honda 

2,158 miles - Moon

7,900 miles - Earth 

124,274 miles - Comet Elenin

864,938 miles - Sun

Closest Earth Trajectory In Miles From Earth

191,084 miles - Asteroid 2005 YU55 

238,857 miles - from the Earth to its Moon

5,592,340 miles - Comet Honda

21,375,169 miles - Comet Elenin

92,955,825 miles - from the Earth to its Sun

Approx. Date Closest To Earth

Mid-August 2011 - Comet Honda

October, 2011 - Comet Elenin

November 8, 2011 - Asteroid 2005 YU55

There is a question of whether these objects will cross paths and exactly what that will do to their trajectory and/or to our orbit, or the orbit of the other planets in our solar system.  Additionally, there is concern that we will travel through the debris tail of Comet Elenin, which is said to be hundreds of miles long.

Is Comet Elenin Going To Be An Extinction Level Event? ...Or Will It Take More Than One Of These Objects? Part 3 of 3

So is our government being honest with us, or are we being taken for fools?  Just read this article from the E.U. Times...

Russian Warning Issued Over “Controlled” Comet Headed Towards Earth

Posted by EU Times on Mar 1st, 2011 // 58 Comments

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A chilling report prepared for President Medvedev by Minister Serdyukov of the Russian Defense Ministry on the building of an additional 5,000 underground ‘bomb’ shelters in Moscow warns that even though progress is being made, the appearance of the new Comet Elenin [photo right] in our Solar System means “additional resources” will have to be added “immediately” as the 2012 timeline for completion “may not be soon enough”.
Sparking the fears of Minister Serdyukov, he says in this report, is that based upon the new orbit calculations for Comet Elenin, it appears in “all likelihood” that this celestial object is under some type of “intelligent control” and will approach our Earth “much closer” than originally thought this coming fall season.

Comet Elenin was discovered by Doctor-Scientist Leonid Elenin on 10 December 2010 from his research facility in Lyubertsy utilizing images acquired from the 18-inch (45-cm) telescope at the ISON-NM Observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico and confirmed by Doctor-Scientists Aleksei Sergeyev and Artem Novichenko from the Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan.

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Doctor-Scientist Leonid Elenin.

Upon its discovery Comet Elenin was traveling very near the ecliptic plane at more than 4 Astronomical Units (375 million miles) from the Sun and headed inbound towards it. Its original perihelion [point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid or comet where it is nearest to the Sun] was calculated to occur well inside Earth’s orbit at about 0.45 Astronomical Units (42 million miles) from the Sun to occur on or about 5 September 2011 making it visible to the naked eye in the pre-dawn skies in the Constellation of Leo.

Most ominous in Minister Serdyukov’s report is his assertion that Comet Elenin appears to be in “direct contact” with the mysterious Jupiter-sized planet discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto that is, also, headed inbound towards our Sun.

American scientists Daniel Whitmire and John Matese from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette have named this mysterious planet Tyche, but as we had previously stated in our 18 February report, “Russian Leader Confirms To Pope New Planet Arrival In 2012”, the ancient peoples of our Earth new it by other names as well.
Interesting to note about Comet Elenin is that even though the American space agency NASA has said “Because of the possibility that the comet’s orbit slightly deviate from, there is no guarantee that Earth will be missed”, they have, also, in contradiction, stated that “…Comet Elenin will come nowhere near the Earth. At its closest (on 10 September 2011) it will be more than 25 million km from our planet.”

To the identity of those extraterrestrial forces controlling Comet Elenin our world had been forewarned about by the former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, who stated about them: “Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about where we were headed and offered to help. But instead we, or at least some of us, interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after.”

As to those “visitors from other planets” referred to by Minister Hellyer we can further glean from the memo sent to President Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) by his Army Chief of Staff George Marshall (1880-1959) [reprinted below in its entirety] about what is now referred to as “The Battle of Los Angeles” where American Forces fired upon a UFO fleet shortly after their countries entrance into World War II.Project Management Certification Online
From the United States initial firing upon these UFO’s in “The Battle of Los Angeles” they continued to appear over both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operation during World War II and were dubbed as “Foo Fighters” by the US Army Air Forces 415th Night Fighter Squadron.

The most famous modern historical account of these UFO/Foo Fighters occurred in the summer of 1947 when at least one of them was shot down, or crashed near the Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico which was home to the US Army Air Forces 509th Bomb Group that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, and is known today as the “Roswell Incident”.

Though initially reported to the American public by their government that a “flying saucer” had, indeed, been captured, the US Military almost immediately contradicted themselves by denying what just 24-yours earlier they had admitted.

Most important to note about the Roswell Incident, however, was that its investigation was headed by the first US Air Force Secretary, and close personal friend of then President Harry Truman (1884-1972), Stuart Symington (1901-1988) who reported his findings to the first US Defense Secretary James Forrestal (1892-1949).

Throughout 1948, and into 1949, Secretary’s Forrestal and Symington repeated clashed leading President Truman to replace Forrestal on 28 March 1949. Within two months (22 May 1949) Forrestal was reported dead by suicide after having jumped out the window of Bethesda Naval Hospital where he had been forcibly detained.

More interesting, however, is the report of the last meeting between Forrestal and Symington on the Roswell Incident, and as, in part, we can read:

“Forrestal accused Clark of having the FBI shadow him, which Clark denied, but which according to all of Forrestal’s biographers could well have been true. Forrestal finally left office in a formal ceremony on March 28th, his last public appearance.

What followed after the ceremony remains mysterious. “There is something I would like to talk to you about,” Symington told Forrestal, and accompanied him privately during the ride back to the Pentagon. What Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office. Friends of Forrestal implied that Symington said something that “shattered Forrestal’s last remaining defenses.” When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, “you are a loyal fellow,” for several hours.”

As we have attempted to detail in many recent reports, including “Greenland Sunrise Shocks World As Superstorms Pound Planet”, “Poisonous Space Clouds Slamming Into Earth Cause Mass Bird And Fish Deaths”, “New Superstorms Warned Have ‘Doomed’ World Food Production” and “Pole Shift Blamed For Russian Air Disaster, Closure Of US Airport”, the greatest fears Forrestal had after Symington’s final Roswell report was given to him are, indeed coming true in our times today.

Though the masses of the American people are still not being told the truth about the dire state of our world, the same cannot be said about their elite masters, who according to new evidence gathered by independent researchers are building for themselves vast underground bunkers to protect themselves when the times of trouble come.

One such company building these underground survival bunkers for the US elite is the American Reassurance Communities (ARC), and who describe their efforts as follows:

“Each ARC Bunker Complex consists of a 300,000 sq ft subterranean self-contained community survival shelter complex designed to accommodate 2500 people for up to 60 months in military grade bunkers complete with schools, medical/dental, greenhouses, theater, recreation, everything needed for a large group of people to live in a safe, comfortable environment and survive almost any disaster.

ARC Bunkers are manufactured to withstand a direct nuclear hit, EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) attacks, biological attacks, hurricanes, tornados, volcanos, earthquakes, floods, solar flares, meteorites, and ground assaults.”

For anyone thinking they can order such protection for themselves (even allowing that they have the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would cost) an ARC spokesman said in a recently released conversation (listen to audio here) that it would take over a year for them to be able to build anything because of the tremendous backorders they are now filling due to what he says is because “everyone is freaked out about something”. And this is aside from the US government’s recent purchase of over $1 Billion in survival food to protect America’s leaders.

To what those in the knowing are so “freaked about” it is in our knowing too, but is, also, so complex and shrouded in shadows as to make it nearly indecipherable to all but the most informed, and which, most assuredly, the masses of people today aren’t even close to.
The complete story, and the knowledge you have a right to know, is only going to be gained by yourself as those who rule over you will tell you nothing, even to the point of disparaging those, like us, who believe not only in your right to know the truth, but how simple it can really be to protect yourself and your families from the many horrors yet to come.

This report, therefore, like all the others before it, is but another “puzzle piece” to be put into place so that when added to the many others to come will show you the shattering truth being kept from you.

Our efforts to keep you informed, also, come at great cost, but which you are able to help out with by going to this Link.

The great German romantic writer Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) once said, “A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.” And these are, indeed, the times one has to choose which they are, we hope you are courageous, they will be the only ones to survive.

http://www.eutimes.net/2011/03/russian-warning-issued-over-controlled-comet-headed-towards-earth/

Astronomers: Comet Elenin may produce greatest meteor showers in history

April 4, 2011 crisisboom Leave a comment Go to comments

helium.com
The unusual Comet Elenin is expected to pass within 21 million miles of Earth on October 16, 2011 and speeding by at more than 85,000 mph—so fast it could travel from Earth to the Moon in less than five hours.

Discovered by amateur Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin in Lyubertsy, Russia on December 10, 2010—who accessed the International Scientific Optical Network’s robotic observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico—the astronomical community has erupted with the excited possibility the celestial traveller could generate the most spectacular meteor showers ever recorded.

Although the comet’s path is expected to change as it draws closer to the sun, astronomical calculations appear to show Elenin’s perihelion occurring well inside Earth’s orbit by September 5th.

Astronomers believe the comet will be visible with a good pair of field binoculars about the middle of August. After then it should become visible in the Northern hemisphere’s predawn sky with the naked eye.

Comet watchers claim that the huge dust trail behind Elenin might become very bright with the tail glowing across the night sky.

The Earth is expected to pass through the giant tail, and the debris may generate fantastic meteor showers for as long as two and a half months.

http://crisisboom.com/2011/04/04/astronomers-comet-elenin/

What do you think?  Do you think there is nothing to worry about or do you think that there is more to the story than the "officials" are telling us?  One thing is for sure...The event will bring some awesome meteor shower viewing...hopefully not up close and personal:)