In a clean room in Building 23 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, a spacecraft called DART was splayed open like a fractured, cubic egg. An instrument called a star tracker—which will, once DART is in deep space, ascertain which way is up—was mounted to the core, along with batteries and a variety of other sensors.
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DART—the Double Asteroid Redirection Test—is designed to crash into an asteroid called Dimorphos. The impact will change Dimorphos's speed by about one millimeter per second, or one five-hundredth of a mile per hour. Though Dimorphos is not about to collide with Earth, DART is intended to demonstrate the ability to deflect an asteroid like it that is headed our way, should one ever be discovered.
Other things to check out:
School Bus-Size Asteroid to Safely Zoom Past Earth | NASA
OSIRIS-REx Unlocks More Secrets from Asteroid Bennu | NASA
News of the Weird | Fake asteroid?
An Atlas Centaur 7 rocket stands on the launchpad in September 1966 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA's leading asteroid expert, Paul Chodas, speculates that asteroid 2020 SO, as it is formally known, is actually a Centaur upper rocket stage that propelled NASA's Surveyor 2 lander to the moon in 1966 before it was discarded.
Instead of a cosmic rock, the newly discovered object appears to be an old rocket from a failed moon-landing mission 54 years ago that's finally making its way back home, according to NASA's leading asteroid expert. Observations should help nail its identity.
This may worth something:
That Asteroid Heading Into Earth's Orbit May Actually Be an Old Rocket From 1966 | Travel +
The unidentified flying object detected by a telescope in Hawaii last month might turn out to be a piece of space junk rather than an asteroid.
What was thought to be an asteroid heading into Earth’s orbit next month might be complete garbage. A NASA expert says the object is likely an old rocket from a moon landing attempt back in 1966, according to the Associated Press .
Last month, an object known as asteroid 2020 SO was spotted from a telescope in Maui . It was expected to enter the Earth’s orbit this autumn and continue orbiting until about May 2021, in what is known as a mini moon, according to Smithsonian Magazine . CNN reported that it could come as close as 27,000 miles away.
How Dodging Class Led to a Rendezvous With an Asteroid
Education : B.S Physics and Astronomy from Yale. Master’s in Aerospace from Stanford University.
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Oliva Billett still chuckles about the first time she considered a career in science and engineering. She and nine other top physics students from her high school participated in an engineering competition. “We had no idea what it was about,” said Billett. “I said yes because we got out of school for a day.”
“I love the variety of my job. Our teams are generally small and fast-paced, which requires each of us to understand the entire system to ensure it will all work together, said Billett.”
New Theory Suggests Tunguska Explosion Was A 650 Foot-Wide Asteroid's Near-Miss With Earth
On the morning of June 30, 1908, the ground trembled in Central Siberia, and a series of flying fireballs, causing a "frightful sound" of explosions, were observed in the sky above the Stony Tunguska River. Strange glowing clouds, colorful sunsets, and a weak luminescence in the night were reported as far as Europe.
Despite its notoriety in pop-culture, hard scientific data covering the Tunguska Event is sparse. Since 1928 more than forty expeditions have explored the site, taking samples from the soil, rocks, and even trees flattened by the explosion, with ambiguous results. Some seismic and air-pressure wave registrations, recorded immediately after the blast, survive to this day and surveys of the devastated forest mapped some thirty years later.
How to Build a Spacecraft to Save the World | WIRED
"Everyone knows it's possible to hit an asteroid," says Justin Atchison, a DART mission designer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. "But there's a big step in between saying it can be done and actually doing it. You learn a lot in that process."
For someone tasked with building a spacecraft to save the world, Andy Rivkin, one of the DART mission's two lead investigators, is surprisingly nonchalant about it. "An asteroid impact is not something that freaks me out at all," he says. "We have a pretty good sense of the odds of it being a problem anytime soon. This is mostly building toward a future where eventually people may need to use this and we want to give them the tools to do that."
Happening on Twitter
BepiColombo is currently being tracked by the #NewNorcia ground station in Western Australia The spacecraft is now… https://t.co/TjBiFny00b esaoperations (from Darmstadt, Germany) Thu Oct 15 03:38:49 +0000 2020
"To get to Mercury without being subsumed by our giant star, the spacecraft will make a series of nine planetary fl… https://t.co/3lzeikxpXH esaoperations (from Darmstadt, Germany) Thu Oct 15 03:24:28 +0000 2020
Today I learned that the accelerometers on our NISAR spacecraft being built right now caught the recent California… https://t.co/ABmo3JVg0K tweetsoutloud (from Pasadena, CA) Fri Oct 09 16:39:00 +0000 2020
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