© NASAA Southern Delta Aquarid fireball streaks over one of the network cameras in July 2010: movie. Every day about 100 tons of meteoroids -- fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks - enter the Earth's atmosphere. Stand out under the stars for more than a half an hour on a clear night and you'll likely see a few of the meteors produced by the onslaught. But where does all this stuff come from? Surprisingly, the answer is not well known.
Now NASA is deploying a network of smart cameras across the United States to answer the question, What's Hitting Earth?
Did that meteor you saw blazing through the sky last night come from the asteroid belt? Was it created in a comet's death throes? Or was it a piece of space junk meeting a fiery demise?
"When I get to work each morning and power up my computer, there's an email waiting with answers," says William Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "And I don't have to lift a finger, except to click my mouse button."
Hollywood hype aside, close encounters of a rocky kind are fairly common. But they're fascinating to local scientists who want to learn how it all began, and maybe fend off armageddon.
© Dina Rudick/Globe StaffFrancesca DeMeo, an MIT postdoctoral researcher, records asteroid movements from her lab in Cambridge.
At 4:33 a.m. on a recent Friday, Timothy Spahr was startled awake by a beep from his cellphone: A text message alerted him that a rocky object was hurtling toward Earth. He told his wife it was "some asteroid thing'' and went to check his computer.
In Hollywood, this would be the opening scene to a doomsday movie. But for Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, it is just another day. About once a month, an object on a potential crash course with Earth disturbs his slumber.
They almost always miss - and this time was no different. The asteroid was just a few feet across and on track to miss by about 11,000 miles. He sent a note to contacts at NASA and posted information about it online.
People have long been fascinated by the threat of apocalypse by asteroid, as depicted in movies such as the 1998 film
Armageddon and 1979's
Meteor, which was inspired by an MIT student project to create a plan to avoid a theoretical collision.
Fires from beneath, and meteors from above,
Portentous, unexampled, unexplained,
Have kindled beacons in the skies; and the old
And crazy earth has had her shaking fits
More frequent, and foregone her usual rest.
Is it a time to wrangle, when the props
And pillars of our planet seem to fail,
And nature, with a dim and sickly eye,
To wait the close of all?
~ 'The Time-Piece,' Task, Book ii, lines 58-66. William Cowper
RealmLeaper
YouTubeSat, 26 Feb 2011 11:40 UTC
A recent sighting of another strange object over Severodvinsk Russia captured February 26, 2011.
I hope you will excuse my cynicism but there is something quite remarkable about this interview with Lembit Opik, the Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire. You will not find one single trace of political gobbledegook or point scoring.
What you will find are the thoughts and feelings of an individual who passionately believes in what he is trying to achieve. This is a brave man carrying a message that no one wants to hear and he is prepared to take the brickbats and mocking that inevitably accompany such a message.
What other tribute could I possibly offer, aside from accusing him of also being a very warm, approachable human being, other than to say that I only wish he was my Lembit Opik MP...
Lembit is the leading voice in the UK on asteroids and the little matter of one of them smacking into us, probably sooner rather than later. And one of those bits of rock doesn't have to be particularly large in order to cause immense devastation and loss of life. Or rather, let me put it this way. If on Christmas day last year I had told you that a giant wave would sweep across south East Asia, hit land and cause the loss of 220,000 lives (so far), you would not have believed me. There's no argument - you wouldn't have believed me. The next day it happened.
We need to wake up rapidly and do something.
Comment: Did you notice the politician's surprise that an asteroid "actually travelled between the moon and the Earth" early in the last decade?
That has happened multiple times since then. Just
three weeks ago a rock came as close to Earth as it could have done being pulled into our atmosphere; the planet's gravity instead changed the rock's direction by nearly 90 degrees.
It is highly unlikely that world leaders at the highest level are not aware of the threat of a meteorite impact. We have been suggesting that they ARE aware, and have been for a very long time. The reader might wish to peruse Laura Knight-Jadczyk's
Comets and Catastrophe series. They are also aware that they cannot do anything to prevent impacts such as those described in the above article. And so, they marginalize the subject and feign disinterest all the while they are making their own preparations to survive.
There is much evidence to strongly suggest that much of the landmass of Western Europe was
destroyed in an meteorite impact around 540 AD, ushering in what is known today as "the dark ages". Further evidence from the study of fossilised tree rings and ice core samples, not to mention historical records, suggests that this most recent event was but one of many events that have happened in a cyclical pattern throughout the course of human history.
As far as we know, no human has ever got out of this place "alive". Perhaps now that the Universe, by posing a clear and present danger to our very existence, is drawing attention to that existence, we might all begin, even at this late hour, to ponder just what the real meaning of our lives, individually and collectively, really is.
© Getty Image
Did you see it? (We didn't. The photo is from the Getty archives. We were at the Encino Neighborhood Council meeting when this happened.)
Local residents have been reporting a bright, white streak in the sky that lasted no more than five seconds. Here are a few of the described sightings sent to our e-mail and posted to the
American Meteor Society's Fireball Sighting Log:"I was driving south on the 405 Freeway around 8:10 p.m. I saw a white streak of light and then a reddish-orange flameout of some sort of meteor. This all lasted about 3 seconds. It was traveling north to south and was on the right (West Side) of the freeway. When I saw it the light, it was just visible over the hill where the homes are on the top of the hill at Mountain Gate. Checking the Internet, see
here, other people had seen this streak of light and reported it." - Michael Martin, Sherman Oaks, to Encino Patch.
Tariq Malik
SPACE.comWed, 23 Feb 2011 12:22 UTC
© CREDIT: NASA/JPLThis NASA graphic depicts the new flight path and trajectory of asteroid 2011 CQ1 after its Feb. 4, 2011 encounter with Earth. The tiny asteroid flew within 3,400 miles (5,471 kilometers) of Earth – a new record.
A tiny asteroid that zipped by Earth this month made the closest-ever approach to our planet without hitting it, an encounter that changed its place in our solar system forever, NASA scientists say.
The asteroid, called 2011 CQ1, came within 3,400 miles (5,471 kilometers) of Earth on Feb. 4. Astronomers with NASA's Near-Earth Object office now say the flyby set a record for a space rock.
"This object, only about 1 meter in diameter, is the closest non-impacting object in our asteroid catalog to date," wrote astronomers Don Yeomans and Paul Chodas in a post-flyby analysis. Both scientists work in the NEO office, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Mark Yoder
9NewsTue, 22 Feb 2011 22:09 UTC
Denver - No one is exactly sure what it was, but many people saw it on Tuesday.
9NEWS started receiving reports of a bright light in the sky over Colorado around 6 p.m. Tuesday. The description of what people saw and the location in the sky varies, but it was seen be numerous people along the Front Range.
Jenny Murphy described it on the 9NEWS Facebook page as "a meteor just north of Lafayette! Reddish with a purple hue from my angle."
Kelly O'Hara Buccino said, "I saw it driving home, it looked like a fire cracker... blue light with green sparkles... it was crazy!"
Clara Moskowitz
Space.comSat, 19 Feb 2011 13:33 UTC
© NASA/SDO/GFSCAn X2.2 flare erupted from the sun's active region 1158 (at lower right) at about 0150 UT or 8:50 pm ET on Feb. 14, 2011.
Washington - Space weather could pose serious problems here on Earth in the coming years, the chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Saturday (Feb. 19).
A
severe solar storm has the potential to take down telecommunications and power grids, and the country needs to work on being better prepared, said NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lubchenco is also the U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere.
"This is not a matter of if, it's simply a matter of when and how big," Lubchenco said of the potential for a dangerous solar flare. "We have every reason to expect we're going to be seeing more space weather in the coming years, and it behooves us to be smart and be prepared."
© Ferruccio Zanotti/Italian Meteor and TLE Network 2011 Fireball 2011.02.18_18.23.42 ± 1 U.T.
Just ten days previously another bright fireball was recorded on the night of February 8th:
Bright Fireball Seen Over Italy
Comment: For more information about this type of phenomenon see:
Dome of the Rock UFO and Kazakhstan Comet - Something Chaotic This Way Comes