Latest news with #PlanetaryDefenseCoordinationOffice
Time of India
01-07-2025
- Science
- Time of India
NASA alert! 120-foot airplane-sized asteroid 2025 MM to make closest flyby on Earth today; should we be concerned
Asteroid 2025 MM: Star gazers and astronomers are pointing to an airplane-sized asteroid 2025 MM , which will have a close but safe flyby of Earth this week. Notwithstanding its closeness, authorities assure us that there is no threat to our planet Earth. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Moving at high velocity and on a well-tracked path, the asteroid will fly by at a comfortable distance. Events like these offer a reminder of space's unpredictable nature and the importance of ongoing sky surveillance. While 2025 MM poses no immediate threat, its flyby underscores the need for scientific vigilance in tracking objects that share our celestial neighbourhood. Asteroid 2025 MM to make closest approach on July 01, 2025: Speed and distance The asteroid is forecast to reach its nearest point to Earth on July 1, traveling at a distance of about 1.29 million kilometers (about 800,000 miles). Although this is close in cosmic terms, it's over three times farther away from Earth than the Moon is. Asteroid 2025 MM is traveling at a speed of approximately 23,874 miles per hour (38,428 kilometers per hour). Traveling this speed, it would take under two hours to orbit Earth if it were in a state of orbit. This is normal for near-Earth objects, which are drawn into the Sun's gravity and orbital dynamics as they move about the inner solar system. Its high velocity and regular path made it simpler for space agencies to simulate its orbit and ensure that it would safely pass by our planet. How large is asteroid 2025 MM Asteroid 2025 MM is approximately 120 feet (36 meters) in diameter—similar to the wingspan of a Boeing 737 plane. While fairly small in cosmic perspective, it's large enough to be seriously considered by planetary defense specialists. Asteroids of this magnitude can do tremendous harm if they come into Earth's atmosphere or collide with the planet's surface. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Yet with 2025 MM, it will pass safely by, providing experts with an opportunity to observe it without risk. Why Aten asteroids like 2025 MM are important to scientists 2025 MM is part of the Aten family of asteroids, which are known to have orbits that are generally within Earth's orbit around the Sun. The orbits of these asteroids normally cross Earth's orbit and hence are very significant to track. Though Aten asteroids are normally seen close to Earth, not all of them are hazardous. NASA actually has a set of parameters by which they check if an asteroid is even likely to be hazardous. Asteroid 2025 MM: Is it considered dangerous NASA has confirmed that asteroid 2025 MM is not classified as a 'Potentially Hazardous Object' (PHO). According to NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, an asteroid must be: Larger than 150 meters (492 feet) in diameter, and Come within 7.4 million kilometers (4.6 million miles) of Earth to qualify as potentially hazardous. With its smaller size (120 feet) and more distant path, 2025 MM doesn't come anywhere close to either threshold. Yet it serves as a reminder that even small space rocks are worth closely monitoring, particularly since even minor changes in orbit could potentially present future hazards. Why scientists are still keeping an eye on it While 2025 MM will not strike Earth, scientists still track it using powerful telescopes and radar. This is owing to the fact that asteroid paths can alter over time as a result of numerous influences: Solar radiation inducing slow drift (referred to as the Yarkovsky effect) Collision or fragmentation occurrences within the asteroid belt Even a small deviation in path would lead to an asteroid coming in closer in a subsequent orbit. That is why continuous monitoring and path forecasting models are essential in planetary defense operations. Asteroid 2025 MM highlights the need for constant vigilance While asteroid 2025 MM will pass safely by Earth, its visit is a sobering reminder of the dynamic and capricious nature of space. Our solar system is teeming with millions of asteroids and comets, several of which make their way across our planet's path without us even realizing it. Asteroid 2025 MM poses no near-term threat, but it does underscore the absolute necessity of careful skygazing and scientific foresight. The heavens are full of marvels—and sometimes, possible threats—and being at the head of the curve may one day prove to be the difference between life and death. Also Read |
ABC News
31-05-2025
- General
- ABC News
Meet the NASA scientist tasked with identifying asteroids on a collision course with Earth
The bright green meteor that blazed a trail over the skies of southern WA earlier this month served as a spectacular reminder of just how vulnerable the Earth is to threats from space. Country police officer and amateur meteorite hunter Marcus Scott found a tennis ball sized piece of the space rock, dubbed the Mother's Day meteorite, in a salt lake about 460 kilometres east of Perth. Hollywood has taught us to fear giant 'planet killer' asteroids, but it's the smaller space rocks that could destroy an entire city. Thankfully, a NASA scientist is on the case, with the job of protecting the planet against such threats. Dr Kelly Fast oversees NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which is responsible for identifying and tracking asteroids, and figuring out if any of these rocky bodies could be on a collision course with Earth. Larger meteors can survive the trip through the atmosphere, often in spectacular fashion, like the Mother's Day meteorite which was estimated to be about half a metre in size. It slammed into the atmosphere above WA travelling at about 15 kilometres a second, before breaking up and landing in a salt lake in the Goldfields. Dr Fast and her colleagues around the world track more than 37,000 near-Earth asteroids, with the US Congress expecting NASA to find 90 per cent of asteroids larger than 140 metres. It's the smaller asteroids that pose the danger because they are harder to find, but could still destroy a land mass the size of an Australian city or even a state. "The asteroid hazard is a global issue. The first order of business is finding asteroids… it's the only natural disaster that you could potentially prevent," she said. Last year an asteroid named 2024 YR4 was discovered, with initial calculations indicating it could come dangerously close to Earth in just seven years' time. With a diameter of approximately 50 metres, if it struck the earth it could cause widespread devastation of a similar scale to the Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908. That explosion occurred over a sparsely populated area, flattening more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. Dr Fast said there were a few different forms of technology that could potentially be used to neutralise the threat from an asteroid, and they all sound like they are straight out of a science fiction movie. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slammed into the asteroid Dimorphous in September 2022, successfully changing the orbit of the 160-metre diameter celestial body. "That was the simplest technique — to impact an asteroid and change its speed, and it was successfully tested with DART," Dr Fast said. To date, it's been the only real world test to save the planet from destruction caused by a rogue space rock. Other techniques being studied include ion beam deflection, using a spacecraft to fire charged particles at the asteroid, giving it a slight nudge to change its orbit. The 'Star Trek' sounding "gravity tractor" is another possible solution, and entails parking an object next to the asteroid and using the slight change in gravity to change its orbit. "And then there's what we always like to call the Hollywood option, because it's what's always used in the movies — a nuclear deflection," Dr Fast said. Although she warned such a technique could create even more of a hazard from the debris field of an exploded asteroid. Dr Fast is hoping there won't be a need to use any of these techniques in our lifetime, but says developing the technology to protect the planet will be a gift for future generations. This week Dr Fast spoke at the Australian Space Awards in Sydney, where she emphasised Australia's importance in keeping the planet safe from the threat of asteroids. And while Australia might be half a world away from NASA headquarters in Washington D.C., two teams of Australian researchers form part of the International Asteroid Warning Network. The University of New South Wales Canberra team search for asteroids using optical telescopes as well as the Parkes Radio Telescope, famous for its role in broadcasting Neil Armstrong's moon walk. On the other side of the country, researchers at the University of Western Australia use the one-metre diameter Zadko Telescope, located about 70 kilometres north of Perth in Gingin, to scan the skies for threats from space. Hollywood-born Dr Fast has a degree in astrophysics and a doctorate in astronomy. She also has the honour of having a nearly three-kilometre diameter space rock named after her, Asteroid Kellyfast. "Like pretty much all asteroids that are named for people, let's hope it stays safely out in the main belt [of space]" she said with a laugh.
Miami Herald
11-05-2025
- Science
- Miami Herald
The researchers charged with defending the planet against asteroids
In December, astronomers identified that the asteroid YR4 had a small but not insignificant chance of striking Earth in 2032, a scenario that experts postulated could have more explosive potential than 500 Hiroshima nuclear bombs. Researchers reclassified YR4 as a non-threat in February, but the interim period when the asteroid was considered a threat, was the first time that the International Asteroid Warning Network had been activated to respond to a threat since its formation in 2014. "The fact is that humanity does have a system that has been put in place in the last decade, essentially, and it worked for YR4," said Danica Remy, president of the Mill Valley-based B612 Foundation, a nonprofit focused on identifying near-Earth objects (NEOs) that pose a threat to humanity. The global apparatus of researchers and cosmologists had formed in 2013 in the wake of an exploding meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia, that shattered glass for miles around. "We did not see that one coming," said Katie Kumamoto, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. "There was no warning until there was actually a fireball in the sky being caught on all of those dashboard cameras on people's cars. I think that was a big wake-up call." Though astronomers have known about the threat posed by NEOs since the 1970s, efforts to catalogue potentially dangerous asteroids and meteors have only seriously materialized in the past decade, according to researchers from LLNL, the Marin County-based Asteroid Institute and NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The Planetary Defense Coordination Office has identified 873 NEOs larger than one kilometer, a size that could be "a disaster of the scale of anything we've seen," according to Planetary Defense Officer Emeritus Lindley Johnson, who established the office in 2016. Another 11,266 NEOs have been identified that are large enough to wipe out entire cities if they landed in a metropolitan area, Johnson added. Johnson said NASA's catalogue has now identified more than 95% of NEOs that pose a threat to Earth. "Even though we now feel we've got a good handle on the population of large near-Earth asteroids, we're still working on understanding what the smaller population is," Johnson said. "We now have this tasking from NASA to find everything that's larger than 140 meters in size." The last major asteroid impact on Earth was the Tunguska Event in 1908 in Siberia, where an asteroid, estimated to be between 50-100 meters in diameter, exploded in the Earth's atmosphere and flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest. Asteroids of that size are estimated to strike Earth once every 200-300 years, while asteroids larger than one kilometer strike Earth once every 500,000 years on average, according to the University of Arizona. The International Asteroid Warning System's researchers, recognizing that an asteroid impact is an inevitability rather than a possibility, have worked to develop numerous strategies to deploy against an asteroid whose trajectory is aligned with Earth. Some of these strategies have already been tested. On Sept. 26, 2022, NASA successfully redirected the asteroid Dimorphos as part of its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) using the strategy of a kinetic impactor - a fancy way of saying scientists crashed into an asteroid and changed its trajectory. The DART mission was a huge step in the planetary defense field, proving that the kinetic impactor could be utilized in the future. "Just changing the speed at which something is moving in orbit, that changes the orbit forever in the future," Johnson said. "The orbital shape, size of the orbit, and where it's going is all determined by the orbital velocity around the sun." Like a real-world game of Galaga, the kinetic impactor strategy works for smaller space rocks, however, other larger asteroids require more intense interventions. Asteroid Institute co-founder Ed Lu and astronaut Stanley G. Love invented the "gravity tractor" method, where, if given enough time, a spacecraft could be placed near an asteroid's gravitational field, "fine-tuning" its orbital trajectory safely away from Earth, Remy said. But what if the asteroid is too large for a kinetic impactor and scientists are too late to identify an impending impact? At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Kumamoto and other researchers are working on a solution: nuclear deflection. For this strategy, a nuclear explosive device would be triggered near an asteroid, sending it off its orbital path and ablating material from its surface. "Because there's just so much energy in a nuclear explosive device, we would be able to apply a much bigger push to the asteroid than we could get from a kinetic impactor," Kumamoto said about the "nuclear option" of planetary defense. "We don't understand that one as well as we understand option number one and option number two." Part of the reason for Kumamoto and other LLNL researchers' limited understanding of nuclear deflection is that international law prevents them. The Outer Space Treaty, approved by the United Nations in 1967, prohibits nuclear weapons in space and limits nations from testing military weapons on any celestial body. Space might be the final frontier, but no nation holds claim to it. In 2014, in the wake of the Chelyabinsk meteor, the United Nations brought greater focus to asteroid threats and planetary defense by sanctioning "International Asteroid Day" on June 30, a commemoration of the Tunguska Event in 1908. Originally founded by Remy's B612 Foundation, along with physicist Stephen Hawking, astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Queen guitarist Brian May in 2014, Asteroid Day is a call to action to keep humanity safe from what lies beyond our atmosphere - because in a world of natural disasters, one of the most devastating phenomena comes from space. "Unlike a hurricane or a tsunami or an earthquake or super volcano, there's really absolutely nothing we can do about those right now," Remy said. "Whereas with an asteroid impact, there are deflection options, and the work that we're doing is really important because warning time is everything." Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
Axios
21-02-2025
- Science
- Axios
An asteroid could hit Earth in 2032. Don't panic — yet
The chances of a 130- to 300-foot-wide asteroid hitting Earth just a few days before Christmas 2032 are increasing — but don't panic (or celebrate) just yet. Why it matters: The near-Earth asteroid, officially named "2024 YR4," could be a regional hazard if it actually hits the planet, NASA says. Driving the news: The odds that YR4 will hit Earth have been creeping up over the past few days, and stand at 2.1% as of Feb. 12. Those probably aren't numbers you'd play in Vegas, but it's still a 1-in-48 chance of impact. Threat level: YR4 currently rates as a 3 on the 0-to-10 Torino scale, which measures asteroid collisions' potential hazards. That translates into possible "localized damage" — which means you wouldn't want to be near the impact zone, but this isn't considered an existential Earth-wide threat. Reality check: YR4 was only first reported to near-Earth asteroid watchers in late January, and it's possible that its impact odds will lessen as researchers spend more time observing and learning about it and its path through space. What they're saying: "Even though it's a very, very low impact probability, it's not often that something this size even reaches that level," Kelly Fast, acting planetary defense officer at NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, tells Axios. "It's a chance to continue to bring the capabilities we have to bear to get the most information possible, to hopefully get enough information for the probability to drop to zero, to know well enough that it's going to pass the Earth safely — and if not, then to have that information also." "But it's so early that, at 2%, it's at that level where, okay, planetary defenders of the world, keep an eye out. But otherwise, it's not something to lose sleep over." What's next: NASA is planning to launch the Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope later this decade, which will look for potentially threatening objects using infrared sensors. Those are better able to spot darkly-colored asteroids compared to visible light telescopes, Fast says. And in 2022, NASA successfully tested asteroid-deflection technology that one day could truly save our bacon — no Bruce Willis or Ben Affleck required.
Yahoo
14-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
NASA identifies asteroid that could hit Earth. Here's why you shouldn't panic
(QUEEN CITY NEWS) — NASA has upped the chances of impact of an asteroid currently orbiting in deep space. The object at hand, 2024 YR4 was discovered in December 2024 during its most recent flyby of the Earth, with a diameter or roughly 180 feet. Recent orbital calculations have increased the chance of Earth impact to 1 in 44 (2.3%) on Dec. 22, 2032. Why asteroid 2024 YR4 is unlikely to hit Earth in 2032 and how scientists keep track Who is monitoring the skies for asteroids like this one? Well, it is a relatively new department within NASA called the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. This office was created in 2016 with the explicit task from Congress to find and track every asteroid at least 140 meters in size. To date, 98% of all asteroid and comets at least 1 kilometer in size have been found in the solar system. So, is it time to panic? In a word, no, as it is likely further observations of 2024 YR4 will drop to the impact chances to zero. But if the improbable does happen, would a potential impact look like? It could resemble very much like the Tunguska Event of 1908 in Russia where an asteroid of similar size exploded over Siberia. It is estimated that 2024 YR4 would have the energy of roughly a 10-megaton bomb, which if impacted in a populated area could be devastating. NASA has already potential interception techniques for asteroids hazardous to Earth with the DART program where an impactor was sent to hit an asteroid and change its path. So, while its unlikely, there are plans to deal with this asteroid if impact chances do go up for 2024 YR4. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
