Questions tagged [asteroids]
Questions regarding relatively small rocky bodies in an orbit around the Sun.
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How much mass did the Late Heavy Bombardment add to Mars?
How much mass was deposited on a terrestrial planet during the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB)?
Is it possible to estimate a reasonable interval, specifically, for Mars?
Could the mass addition to Mars ...
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Extinction Level Event (Asteroid Impact Hypothesis) Likelihood Equation
We have the Drake Equation that calculates the probability of intelligent ET (extraterrestrials/aliens).
Since the asteroid impact hypothesis has been more or less accepted as the cause of the K-Pg ...
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Are there any estimates of the Roche Limit for 152830 Dinkinesh?
The Lucy spacecraft recently flew past the asteroid 152830 Dinkinesh on its way through the asteroid belt and photos show that Dinkinesh has a moon consisting of a contact binary.
(Image is Public ...
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If the Earth had another moon would it be better protected from asteroids?
Would the moons get struck by asteroids instead of the Earth or would the moons attract more asteroids and make it more likely the planet gets hit?
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What's the reason for the hollow region in Oort cloud?
Can someone please tell what caused the hollow space (pointed by yellow arrow) in the Oort Cloud?
I understand that it is called cloud because the cluster of objects does not align with the major ...
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How was this image of the faculae in the Occator crater obtained?
The picture in question (that I'm asking about) is at the bottom, of this post. Now, did they simply take a picture with reduced light intake? If so how much? 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 or less? Or did they ...
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derivation of reduced magnitude of asteroids
I've noticed that there is this parameter called reduced absolute magnitude $V(\alpha)$ and it is defined as below according to the paper by Mahlke et al. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.icarus.2020....
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What kind of telescope would be needed to image a 10m dim object 1 million km away?
There's a 10m diameter object 1 million km away from you, stationary with respect to you. The object is dim: it is at 3K and is not reflecting any light towards you. So you have to pick it out by the ...
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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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how big would an asteroid have to be to leave a crater on Earth
if an asteroid were to hit earth, how big would it have to be to make a crater and not just vaporise in the atmosphere?
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Any results from the probe that has been crashed into an asteroid once?
About two or three years ago I think a probe whose name I forgot has been crashed into an asteroid at high speed to see what would happen if we tried to collide something with an asteroid on Earth ...
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How can Aggregation of Gravitational Fields of subplanetary solar objects improve our understanding of the motion of the planets?
If we imagine magnets on a table as a simplified analogy in regards to gravitational attraction between objects, then it may be demonstrated that when three objects are placed in a row labeled in ...
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How will the 2023 occultation of Betelgeuse be seen from Iran?
I was looking at the Wikipedia page for 319 Leona and I got excited to know that it will occult the bright star Betelgeuse on December 12, 2023 (It's predicted with the use of Solex application):
On ...
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Which kind of celestial body killed dinosaurs?
Well, the internet lies a lot, so there's so much information mixed with misinformation...
Some sources call what killed the dinosaurs an asteroid and others a meteor.
Is there any consensus on this?
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If two asteroids will collide, how can we call it?
If a smaller celestial body collides with a larger celestial body, but neither is classified as a planet, what do we call the smaller celestial body that collided with the larger one?
Asteroid/...
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Is there a way to tell the difference between earth andesite from Mars
I'm curious 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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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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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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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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