Questions tagged [asteroids]
Questions regarding relatively small rocky bodies in an orbit around the Sun.
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Why did they decide to hit Dimorphos in the retrograde direction rather than prograde; was it a "coin-toss" or were there implications for observing?
CNN Space and Defense Correspondent Kristin Fisher does a really good job of summarizing the current state of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test early observational results for general public ...
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Is there a way to tell the difference between earth andesite from Mars
I'm curios if there is a way to test if this sample might be Martian andesite.
What type of oxygen isotope (or other) test can be done to address this in some way?
As background, any information ...
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2001 VB - when will it be reacquired?
2001 VB's orbit is poorly known but has a two-in-a-billion risk of a collision with the earth in 2023.
Assuming that it were on a collision course, when would it be likely to be reacquired? Which ...
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Could the dinosaurs have seen the asteroid that killed them?
Wikipedia says the Chicxulub impactor is thought to have been a 10-15 km diameter object. Would it have been visible to a (human*) naked eye before impact? And if so, would it have appeared like a ...
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How did asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 get its "face"? Is it reconstructed from optical or radar imaging, or something else?
(Image sources linked below)
NPR's March 10, 2023 Newly found asteroid has a 'very small chance' of hitting Earth, NASA says includes an image of what looks like a computer reconstructed 3D surface of ...
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Has Hubble ever been used to try to image a near Earth asteroid?
This answer to How big will Apophis appear? points out that the near Earth asteroid Apophis will likely be close to 2 arcseconds in diameter as seen from Earth during its close approach in 2029. I ...
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How to get the name of an asteroid if I have it's RA - dec position at a particular time?
I have the RA - Dec position of a potential asteroid and the time at which it was taken. Is it possible to use this information to get more information about this asteroid, like its name, orbital ...
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How fast would a one mile asteroid have to go for it to match the impact that killed the dinosaurs?
I was playing a silly asteroid game and had a question in my head: how fast would a mile long meteor have to go to match the impact of the Chicxulub impact? (The impact that killed the dinosaurs.)
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Do solar flares have a noticeable effect on asteroid orbits?
I've read that in advanced trajectory calculations, sunlight is even taken into account. Does this also apply to transient events like solar flares?
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Which citizen science occultation experiences were done in the late 80's in the US? With what results?
The news story "A star eclipsed by an asteroid in France this week-end: how and why scientists ask you to observe it" (in French) relates how people were are asked to look at the occultation ...
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Was Theia a planet or an asteroid?
According to an article Theia (from the Giant impact hypothesis) was an asteroid and according to The Wikipedia article about Theia Theia was an Earth trojan (which is an asteroid). Which is dubious, ...
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A silicate asteroid hits the Moon at 35 km/s. What portion of the ejecta generated reaches lunar escape velocity?
Background:
Below is a graph from John D. O'Keefe's and Thomas J. Ahrens's Impact and Explosion Crater Ejecta, Fragment Size, and Velocity. Said graph models the amount of ejecta produced by silicate ...
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Is it possible that the Rosetta orbiter moved the comet when it crashed?
Rosetta Comet Orbiter (RCO) crashed into the surface of a comet after the comet passed near Jupiter, which would be out-of-range for its antenna to communicate with Earth. So, the ESA made the ...
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"To date we have covered 624 square degrees of sky near to and interior to the orbit of Venus" meaning wrt Asteroid survey Interior to Earth and Venus
CNN's October 31, 2022 ‘Planet killer’ asteroid spotted hiding in the sun’s glare links to Sheppard et al. (2022) A Deep and Wide Twilight Survey for Asteroids Interior to Earth and Venus. The ...
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If an Asteroid was to strike the Earth, would it affect the Earth's rotation?
If an Asteroid was to strike the Earth, would it affect noticeably the Earth's rotation, and if so, how large would this Asteroid have to be?
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First satellite of an asteroid (or double asteroid) ever imaged by delay-Doppler radar?
In comments about my previous bounty on the Space SE question Which deep-space spacecraft flew closest by Earth during a gravitational assist?, I started to look at the Galileo mission and ran across ...
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How do we know that ice from the S1094b event was from Mars surface and not from the impactor?
The recent news story NASA’s InSight Lander Detects Stunning Meteoroid Impact on Mars, about an impact that occurred on Mars on December 24, 2021 (event S1094b), shows a picture of the impact crater, ...
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What does "Secondary reflection from Didymos may allow imaging of the night side of Dimorphos" mean? Why useful? Imaged from where?
@ConnorGarcia's "impactful" answer to Why did they decide to hit Dimorphos in the retrograde direction rather than prograde; was it a "coin-toss" or were there implications for ...
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Other than Lomb-Scargle Periodograms and String Length Minimization, what other methods can be used to find the period of unevenly spaced data?
I'm doing some research into how different methods of finding the period with unevenly spaced data compare with each other. So far, I've looked at the Lomb-Scargle and String-Length Minimization. I ...
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Did the temporary asteroid name DA₄₂ arise naturally and fortuitously (as a precursor to a Douglas Adams namesake)? Or did someone help it along?
42 (Number) just might be the longest Wikipedia page for a single number integer.
In the Astronomy subsection of that article it says:
In January 2004, asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the permanent name ...
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Does anything orbit the Sun faster than Mercury?
Mercury's orbital period around the Sun is about 88 days. Comets and other things have gotten closer to the Sun than Mercury does. But has there ever been an asteroid or some other body discovered ...
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The Interpretation of Uncertainty Map of NEO in Minor Planet Center page
I am an observational astronomer. I have just started with the observations. If any of you use MinorPlanetCenter website to get the ephemeris of a possible NEO in the NEO confirmation page, there is ...
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How would a small TCO (temporarily captured orbiter) or other natural Earth satellite most likely be detected?
A sentence from the abstract of The population of natural Earth satellites states:
At any given time there should be at least one NES of 1-meter diameter orbiting the Earth. The average temporarily-...
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If two fast asteroids collided, would the temperature and pressure be high enough to cause nuclear fusion?
Some near earth objects travel with speeds of dozens of kilometers per second. Would a head-on collision between two of them create suitable conditions for nuclear fusion?
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Do NEA (Near Earth Asteroids) have minable water ice?
Water is very useful for rocket fuel and life support in space. But does water, in abundance and form which conceivably could be usefully mined this century, really exist in NEA's? Or do we have to go ...
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Do/did the asteroids contain enough water to create Earth's oceans?
It seems from the recent Science paper by Altwegg et al (2014) that the commonly accepted source of Earth's water being the comets might not be (completely) true. Their study suggest that the water in ...
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Water Ice on Meteorites
I was reading an article by David O'Brien et al. where it stated
"in meteorites only the water bound to the silicates can be found, all the water ice having been lost, whereas on asteroids water ...
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Calculating the luminosity of a comet
Assuming a 9-km comet is heading towards the Earth and it is at distance 5.2 AU away from the Sun, what is its luminosity? Assume that it has an albedo of 0.5?
For now, I have calculated the Sun's ...
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absolute magnitude of an asteroid
I've done some research and found that one could derive the absolute magnitude $H$ of an asteroid in the following way. $H$ is the brightness of the asteroid, observed on Earth, if the asteroid were ...
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Is there a certain thermal inertia for maximum Yarkovsky?
The video below summarizes current work at asteroid 101955 Bennu by OSIRIS-REx to characterize its properties to provide better estimates of the Yarkovsky effect1's impact on its trajectory for an ...
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creating asteroid light curves and analysing them
I came across the video Tutorial: Creating a Lightcurve of a Minor Planet linked below by Tycho Tracker, which itself is a software to build an asteroid light curve from raw images and analyse it to ...
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Are asteroids 2012 PM35 and 2020 OG106 aliases?
As a sequel to my asteroid's conjunctions search, I found those two bodies
having very similar Kepler orbital elements and being so extremely close that they might be duplicates in JPL's database.
<...
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following several unknown phenomena detected at the edge of the solar system, is there a 5th force which acts at the edge of the solar system?
following several unknown phenomena detected as the acceleration of Oumuamua and electrons and strange data sent by traveler 1 at the edge of the solar system, is there a 5th force which acts at the ...
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is an asteroid impact the same as an atom bomb [closed]
Pretty much what it says on the tin. Would an asteroid like say, the one that killed the dinosaurs be like a massive atomic bomb? With the eyes melting, bodies burnt to a crisp, leaving only shadows ...
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Observed data: Why so many MPECs about TNOs lately?
The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars (MPECs)
for July 15 through July 18 reported an unusually high number of re-observations of known trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).
These were found in the
Pan-...
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Are Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) asteroids? [closed]
Are Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) asteroids?
Please, base your answer. If possible, give sources. Thanks.
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Why are asteroids so much richer in precious metals than Earth's crust?
Did the majority of Earth's precious metals sink below the crust during Earth's formation?
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calculating MPC orbital uncertainty parameter U
I'm trying to understand how the orbital uncertainty parameter 'U' introduced by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) is actually calculated for minor bodies. This wikipedia page gives the formulae to be ...
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What image analysis approaches/algorithms are used to detect near-Earth objects?
Disclaimer: I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist. I'm a computer scientist.
Astronomers collect vast amounts of image data through astronmical surveys.
The data is then analysed for signs of ...
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Which kernel does HORIZONS get the Geometric Albedo from?
I am new to using SPICE and the SPICE Toolkit. My goal is to extract body radius, albedo, and distance from the sun of a number of solar system objects. The tools provided by NAIF are great and I ...
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Why are what end up being meteorites not in stable orbit as planets and large asteroids are?
We don't have to worry about Mars, etc. hitting Earth. Is it that, being smaller, small asteroids have less inertia and so are more affected by, I guess, the gravity of various planets?
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How much energy to shorten a synodic month by about 1.56%?
Suppose the moon underwent a single, massive, large-object bombardment event. About what number (or range) of about what mean mass of objects could shorten the synodic month by about 1.5633%?
(Assume ...
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With only seemingly two measurements 30 minutes apart, how were astronomers able to determine that asteroid 2022 EB5's trajectory intersected Earth?
Earthsky.org's Asteroid discovered hours before Earth impact begins
Hungarian astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky at the Piszkésteto Mountain Station – part of Konkoly Observatory near Budapest – ...
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What if the Earth was hit by a small asteroid having close to the speed of light?
If the Earth was hit by an asteroid having diameter of about 5 km and moving with a speed close to the speed of light? What would happen?
Would it instantly evaporate? Could it make the Earth ...
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How is asteroidal rock formed?
So when planets form, dust from the protoplanetary nebula gets collected by gravity and then heated and reformed under pressure until it forms dense masses of stuff which we call rock.
However, ...
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Good source for the relationship between absolute magnitude, diameter, and albedo?
In this answer I have rearranged an equation from somewhere, and now I can not relocate the source. My re-aranged form is:
$$M_{Abs} = 5 \left(\log_{10}(1329) -\frac{1}{2}\log_{10}(\text{albedo}) -\...
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Will 3,600ft asteroid be visible at my location tonight?
According to NASA, a 1.1-kilometer asteroid called 7482 (1994 PC1) will be visible tonight at 5:50PM.
How do I know if this asteroid will be visible at my location with the naked eye? When NASA says 5:...
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How do the giant planets excite the orbits of asteroids?
The giant planets, particularly Jupiter, are notorious for bringing about changes in eccentricities and inclinations of smaller bodies(asteroids and KBOs). Jupiter, in fact, throws almost all the ...
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Accuracy of Laplace Method for determining orbital elements
Recently I had to implement the Laplace method and apply it to 3 observations of Mars (10 days in between two observations). The results were pretty good, with discrepancies with real data well below ...
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Power law of object mass in Milky way
Red dwarfs are more common than larger stars. Does this trend continue to smaller objects? If you take every "condensed object" from dust grains through asteroids, planets, and stars in the ...
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