Category Archives: Asteroids & Comets

Asteroids & Comets, Astronomy, Space participation

Join search for unknown objects in and beyond our own solar system

NASA is sponsoring a new citizen-scientist project hosted at Zooniverse called  Backyard Worlds: Planet 9:

NASA-funded Website Lets the Public Search for New Nearby Worlds 

This artist’s concept illustrates a close-up view of a cool brown dwarf. Objects like this, drifting just beyond our solar system, have been imaged by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and could be discovered by Backyard Worlds: Planet 9. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech › Full image and caption

NASA is inviting the public to help search for possible undiscovered worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. A new website, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, lets everyone participate in the search by viewing brief movies made from images captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The movies highlight objects that have gradually moved across the sky.

“There are just over four light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this vast territory is unexplored,” said lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Because there’s so little sunlight, even large objects in that region barely shine in visible light. But by looking in the infrared, WISE may have imaged objects we otherwise would have missed.”

WISE scanned the entire sky between 2010 and 2011, producing the most comprehensive survey at mid-infrared wavelengths currently available. With the completion of its primary mission, WISE was shut down in 2011. It was then reactivated in 2013 and given a new mission assisting NASA’s efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are asteroids and comets on orbits that bring them into the vicinity of Earth’s orbit. The mission was renamed the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE).

The new website uses the data to search for unknown objects in and beyond our own solar system. In 2016, astronomers at Caltech, in Pasadena, California, showed that several distant solar system objects possessed orbital features indicating they were affected by the gravity of an as-yet-undetected planet, which the researchers nicknamed “Planet Nine.” If Planet Nine — also known as Planet X — exists and is as bright as some predictions, it could show up in WISE data.

The search also may discover more-distant objects like brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars, in nearby interstellar space.

“Brown dwarfs form like stars but evolve like planets, and the coldest ones are much like Jupiter,” said team member Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “By using Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, the public can help us discover more of these strange rogue worlds.”

Unlike more distant objects, those in or closer to the solar system appear to move across the sky at different rates. The best way to discover them is through a systematic search of moving objects in WISE images. While parts of this search can be done by computers, machines are often overwhelmed by image artifacts, especially in crowded parts of the sky. These include brightness spikes associated with star images and blurry blobs caused by light scattered inside WISE’s instruments.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 relies on human eyes because we easily recognize the important moving objects while ignoring the artifacts. It’s a 21st-century version of the technique astronomer Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto in 1930, a discovery made 87 years ago this week.

On the website, people around the world can work their way through millions of “flipbooks,” which are brief animations showing how small patches of the sky changed over several years. Moving objects flagged by participants will be prioritized by the science team for follow-up observations by professional astronomers. Participants will share credit for their discoveries in any scientific publications that result from the project.

“Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 has the potential to unlock once-in-a-century discoveries, and it’s exciting to think they could be spotted first by a citizen scientist,” said team member Aaron Meisner, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in analyzing WISE images.

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a collaboration among NASA, UC Berkeley, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Arizona State University in Tempe, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage citizen science projects on the internet.

A previously cataloged brown dwarf named WISE 0855?0714 shows up as a moving orange dot in this loop of WISE images spanning five years. By viewing movies like this, anyone can help discover more of these objects. Credits: NASA/WISE › Larger view

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena manages and operates WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The WISE mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. Science operations and data processing take place at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, visit: http://backyardworlds.org

For more information about NASA’s WISE mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/wise

 

Asteroids & Comets, Astronomy

Video: Exocomets – “Now you see them, now you don’t”

Thousands of exoplanets around other stars have now been detected (mostly indirectly) in the past couple of decades. Now exocomets at other stars have also been detected. Here is a SETI Seminar about these distant dirty snowballs:

From the caption:

Present technology does not enable us to view images of these kilometer-sized infalling bodies, but the evaporation of gaseous products liberated from exocomets that occurs close to a star can potentially cause small disruptions in the ambient circumstellar disk plasma. For circumstellar disks that are viewed “edge-on” this evaporating material may be directly observed through transient (night-to-night and hour-to-hour) gas absorption features seen at rapidly changing velocities.

Using high resolution spectrographs mounted to large aperture ground-based telescopes, we have discovered 15 young stars that harbor swarms of exocomets. In this lecture we briefly describe the physical attributes of comets in our own solar system and the instrumental observing techniques to detect the presence of evaporating exocomets present around stars with ages in the 10 – 100 Myr range.

We note that this work has particular relevance to the dramatic fluctuations in the flux recorded towards “Tabby’s star” by the NASA Kepler Mission, that may be explained through the piling up of swarms of exocomets in front of the central star.

Asteroids & Comets, Space business, Space Systems

Videos: Asteroid mining + 3D printing in space + Smallsats

Here is an interview with Chris Lewicki, chief of the asteroid mining company Planetary Resources:

As Humans venture out far away from the Earth into the solar system, they will need material resources to keep us going. Where do we get those from? One for-profit company, Planetary Resources, wants to be the one to make it happen.

We had a chance to speak with the company’s President and CEO, Chris Lewicki about the company’s plans to survey, prospect, and exploit near-Earth asteroids. The company has a lot of financial backing and has plans to send its first satellite to an asteroid in 2020.

This interview was originally broadcast as part of our ongoing Facebook Live segment, The Convo: www.facebook.com/PCMag/videos…

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Jason Dunn, CTO of Made In Space, talks about the role of 3d printing in space development:

NASA intern turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Jason Dunn, saw what was holding humans back from colonizing outer space…and decided to do something about it. With his company Made in Space’s cutting-edge 3D printer, astronauts can break their reliance on costly resupply missions from Earth and—for the first time ever—build new supplies for themselves in space. Dunn and his team believe their invention will usher in a new era of dramatic progress in space.

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Craig Clark, CEO of Clyde Space in Scotland, talks about their smallsat projects:

Update: An interview about long time space advocate and entrepreneur Rick Tumlinson and the New Worlds Conferences:

Asteroids & Comets, Space Science

ESA Rosetta mission ends with spacecraft impacting the surface of Comet 67P/C-G

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The European Space Agency (ESA) ended the Rosetta mission to Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko today by maneuvering the spacecraft onto (or, more likely, into) the surface of the comet: Mission complete: Rosetta’s journey ends in daring descent to comet – ESA

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Comet landing site: Sequence of images captured by Rosetta during its descent to the surface of Comet 67P/C-G on 30 September.

ESA’s historic Rosetta mission has concluded as planned, with the controlled impact onto the comet it had been investigating for more than two years. 

Confirmation of the end of the mission arrived at ESA’s control centre in Darmstadt, Germany at 11:19 GMT (13:19 CEST) with the loss of Rosetta’s signal upon impact.

Rosetta carried out its final manoeuvre last night at 20:50 GMT (22:50 CEST), setting it on a collision course with the comet from an altitude of about 19 km. Rosetta had targeted a region on the small lobe of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, close to a region of active pits in the Ma’at region.

The descent gave Rosetta the opportunity to study the comet’s gas, dust and plasma environment very close to its surface, as well as take very high-resolution images.

Pits are of particular interest because they play an important role in the comet’s activity. They also provide a unique window into its internal building blocks.

The information collected on the descent to this fascinating region was returned to Earth before the impact. It is now no longer possible to communicate with the spacecraft.

This video shows the trajectory that led the spacecraft into the comet:

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Here is a video preview of Rosetta’s final act from TMRO.tv:

TMRO Astronomer Jared Head gives us a review of the incredible Rosetta mission from the European Space Agency, and then gives us a preview of what to expect in it’s final days ahead at the end of the mission.

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Asteroids & Comets, Simulators, Space Systems

Video: Simulation of Rosetta’s final maneuvers and landing on Comet 67P/C-G

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The European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will end soon with the spacecraft touching down onto the icy rock sometime around September 29-30, 2016.

This video animation of Rosetta’s mission end was created with BINARY SPACE’s SpaceTraveller™, “the ultimate Solar System & Space Missions Simulator”:

The SpaceTraveller™ is a 3D Solar System & Space Missions Simulator designed for the Microsoft® Windows® platform (Microsoft® Windows® 7 or higher only). Download it and have a try for free: http://www.binary-space.com/products….

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