NASA Snaps New Photo of Incoming Asteroid 135
astroengine writes "Wider than an aircraft carrier and darker than coal, asteroid 2005 YU55 is soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth and moon on its latest path through the inner solar system. This new radar image was acquired Nov. 7 by the 70-meter radio telescope at NASA's Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif., and shows the approaching space rock in unprecedented detail." Phil Plait has posted some information from NASA about just how they're doing the tricky job of tracking the asteroid.
Bullshit (Score:1)
What don't they want us to see?!
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Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
We apologize for not getting you a magazine quality glossy of an essentially black object moving at 11 miles per second through the vastness of space nearly a million miles away. We are in a bit of a budget crunch.
Sorry,
NASA
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Funny)
I don't understand why they don't just send it to a crime scene investigators lab to have the image made crystal clear and so that we can view the asteroid at more angles.
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Obviously they forgot to say enhance. [youtube.com]
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We apologize for not getting you a magazine quality glossy of an essentially black object moving at 11 miles per second through the vastness of space nearly a million miles away. We are in a bit of a budget crunch.
Sorry,
NASA
P.S. Due to further budget cuts, the James Web Space Telescope will be switched off. Further pictures will be taken when it comes into range of a Canon Powershot.
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Yeah, I looked at it and I got impatient waiting for the interlacing to catch up. Took me a while, that's probably a good reason why I won't be working for NASA.
Phantom Image. (Score:2)
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The new radar image looks like the bald scalp and the eyes of Phantom, the Ghost who walks. (Walker when he comes out of the African Jungles on missions). Indrajal Comics used to reprint them in India. Wonder if he was as popular in USA/Europe. Wondering how I never even noticed the racial overtones when I was young.
Yes, it was in the newspapers comics (weekdays and weekends) and even enjoyed a spin off (Phantom 2040) cartoon.
Always like it,not sure why exactly, just struck a cord with me i guess.
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Yes, we know who the Phantom is in the West.
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They still draw and publish a magazine with him in Sweden. Probably only Superman/Batman are more well known/popular there.
Wider than an aircraft carrier & darker than c (Score:3)
...Faster than a speeding bullet, able to level entire buildings in a single blow. ;-)
How many.... (Score:2)
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How much olympic swimming pools does it displace if it was to hit the ocean?
All of them :)
From the article, about the pixels: (Score:5, Informative)
The article explains why the asteroid looks like a pixelated sprite taken from the era of Monkey Island.
For those that didn't want to bother reading both articles and just wanted to have a look at the image but then thought "WTF" after having a look at it:
"The individual pulses can be timed very accurately as well, so that the shape of the asteroid can be determined, too. If there is a bump on the asteroid, like a hill, then a pulse hitting that won’t travel quite as far as a pulse that hits a crater. It gets back sooner, and this can be measured. The spatial resolution of this method at the distance of YU 55 will be about 4 meters, so they’ll be able to make an image that’s about 100 pixels across of it."
image: http://news.discovery.com/space/2011/11/07/asteroid-2005-yu55-new-825.jpg [discovery.com]
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I read... apparently it's dark; very dark - reflecting less than 1% of the light that hits it. I was going to ask where to look, but I'm guessing even a decent regular telescope won't really be able to see much, if anything, and I don't have a decent telescope.
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Bah... (Score:1)
It looks computer generated to me.
I wanted to see a real life pic. Not an obvious photoshop on on an XT..
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Wow (Score:3)
soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth
A bit sensationalist no? More accurate would be "not quite straight toward Earth" or "not toward Earth at all but at some point that passes close to Earth".
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Imagine the earth is your face, and the asteroid is a bullet coming within arms length of you.
You can't hit me, I'm hiding behind the Library of Congress!
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So you're suggesting God has bad aim?
Nope. Must be a warning shot.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably, but this wouldn't be within arm's length.
The Earth has a diameter of about 12,756 km. A human face (from tip of nose to back of head) is about 8 inches. (Yes, I actually measured mine.) The asteroid will pass no closer than 324,600km from the Earth. This gives us the equivalent "bullet distance to face" distance of 203.5 inches, or nearly 17 feet. If that's "arm's length", you have some very long arms! Remember, space is big. Mindbogglingly big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quote here.)
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I actually did more math to figure out the size of the asteroid. At that scale, the asteroid would be the size of a bacterium. I doubt you'd notice someone shooting a bacteria 17 feet from your head (no matter what speed it was travelling at).
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While there is a bit of sensationalism involved, just imagine if we scaled everything down. Imagine the earth is your face, and the asteroid is a bullet coming within arms length of you. You'd probably feel like it was being shot directly at you as well.
If this analogy were scaled correctly, the bullet would be smaller than a bb pellet and the head would be denser than steel, meaning the analogy is also sensationalist.
Even if the analogy was valid, if you knew that the chance of a bullet hitting you was so low that a calculator with a precision of 1000 decimal places would still show it as zero. would you still be terrified? If the answer is 'yes' then the sensationalism is working.
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Well, it might be straight towards the Earth, but by the time it gets here, the Earth will have moved. I'm sure that a vector along the asteroid's direction of motion points toward the Earth at some point in its orbit.
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actually...
soaring at over 11 miles a second straight
towards Earth and moon
When you don't take it out of context it's a 100% accurate statement. The asteroid is heading straight towards the Earth/Moon system, it's just that the portion of it that will be hit is empty space.
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soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth
A bit sensationalist no? More accurate would be "not quite straight toward Earth" or "not toward Earth at all but at some point that passes close to Earth".
They could have gone for awe-inspiring, watch the serene little asteroid drift past mighty Earth, to the tune of Blue Danube. That would be pretty neat.
Alas, I've grown weary of US media - it feels some necessity to amp-up everything, particularly the mundane or ordinary (or even tragic) because people wouldn't tune in, unless they did -- really, I find myself tuning out.
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Which made me think:
Imagine we found another planet, with another intelligent race on it, and for whatever reason we decided we should destroy them. I can't think of an easier manner to achieve that than to build a huge bomb/spacecraft, disguise it as an asteroid and put it in a route that would seemingly pass very close to their planet, but miss it by just a little bit! This way they would probably let it pass by, unsuspecting. And once it's close enough we just use some rockets to get it to hit the planet
Bigger then Apophis? (Score:1)
Also, in this YouTube animation it looks like it will be a very close miss.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unfti6ZByj0 [youtube.com]
That's no asteroid. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a space station.
Damn, round (Score:2)
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They're probably here to clear out the Ferengis. [wikipedia.org]
Oddly low res (Score:2)
Wow. The thing is right next to the planet, probably would make a big "kaboom" if it actually hit, and all we have so far is a badly pixelated image.
I think the tech could use a bit more funding to have more advance warning.
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Of course, if we discovered the asteroid that was going to hit us was shaped like a giant phallus or something equally embarrasing we'd be more motivated to deflect it than if it was simply a dot on a RADAR screen.
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Of course, if we discovered the asteroid that was going to hit us was shaped like a giant phallus or something equally embarrasing we'd be more motivated to deflect it than if it was simply a dot on a RADAR screen.
No, but it would certainly be proof that God has a sense of humor.
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They should just hit the Enhance button.
Why side-lit? (Score:3)
I read the articles. I watched the video. But, I'm confused: why does the asteroid appear side-lit in the images?
If we're imaging the asteroid based on radar that's transmitted from the Earth, and the asteroid is heading nearly directly toward us, then we should be able to see images of the asteroid nearly full face on, rather than it appearing like a crescent moon with illumination from the sun, right? The radar illumination is from a source that spatially coincides with the receiving apparatus, so the image should appear more like the full moon.
What am I missing here?
Re:Why side-lit? (Score:5, Informative)
Up in the image is earth-ward. The vertical axis is the pulse return delay, and the horizontal axis is doppler shift of the pulse return.
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So...it's not a photo after all.
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What is your definition of 'photo'? Does it involve 'photons'? Can the photons have frequency in the microwave? If I had microwave sensitive eyes would my photos have microwave photons? What if I had a microwave sensitive camera?
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On the otherhand, if other posters in this thread are correct and the image is only a spectrogram, then certainly the word "photo" does not apply. A photo should be a record of spatial data.
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So...it's not a photo after all.
It's awfully hard to get a computer to mix the developer correctly. So we gave up a while ago and decided that we would just use digital simulacrums on the net.
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I wanted to mod you up because you used at word, but I decided it would be unfair.
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Please mod the parent up, that's a remarkably informative reply, especially from an AC.
The important part, if I understand the technique then, is not that we're painting the surface pixel by pixel, as one might expect for an image produced by scanning a focused beam across the asteroid surface to create a 2D image, and as I expected to see in the photo. Instead of a scanning beam, there's a single pulse that gets sent out with some impressively sophisticated processing on the echo allows that signal to be
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But I think the articles are making quite a fuss about spatial resolution - are you sure the image doesn't contains some spatial elements as well as just time & frequency?
From your doppler shift explanation, can we conclude, since the profile of the image is has some width, that the object is rotating? If it were not rotating, then the image would simply be a vertical line?
Still a bit confusing...
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It's not being imaged by radar, it's being imaged by a radio-telescope. So, just as with an optical telescope, you'll see it "lit" on the side closest to the source of illuminating radio waves, which will presumably be the sun. There's no source of radio energy at the imaging end.....
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Mod Parent Up.
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Just to clarify a bit: those radio telescopes can be used like radar guns, sending out short pulses of focused radio waves. These pulses are aimed at the asteroid and move at the speed of light, hitting the rock and bouncing back.
It's radar
illumination (Score:1)
If this is a "radar" image, where the telescope sent a pulse and got an image from the reflection, why in the picture does it look like the illumination is comming from the above the object? Shouldn't the whole visible face be illuminated? I would like to see all the detail received by the radar. If this is artificial illumination of a solid model build from the facing radar data, I wish the illuminator position would be near my point of view. If this is the actual radar image, then I am confused about
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You seem to have a mental link to pz [slashdot.org], although with a lag of 480000 ms.
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Imagine how I felt when that signal finally made it through my slow outer layers! ;->
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The asteroid is projected on the image in a way that makes the illuminated part be up. With a different projection, if could be down, or on the middle.
The bright part is what is headed to us.
Article is Amazing! (Score:2)
Wow the article that OP linked to is amazing! The only problem with it is that there were not enough exclamation marks! Needs more exclamation marks!
what about the moon? (Score:2)
Looks like we are pretty safe, but, it does pass through the moons orbit. Which makes me wonder, what if such an object hit the moon? While it probably wouldn't effect us much directly, what would the result be? We would certainly be able to witness the impact even without a telescope.
How would this effect our society? What would the moon look like afterwards? What kind of science could be done by observing this? Would we wake up as a society to the much more real threat of an impact on earth? Would
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I suspect that a lot of the debris blown out of the resulting crater would make its way to the earth. That would result in some spectacular meteor showers and possibly some larger chunks actually reaching the surface.
It will, of course, demolish the secret moon base, setting the Nazis plans for conquest back a few decades.
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There is no Nazi moon base, thats preposterous.
The aliens who are mining the moon would not have allowed it.
Unless, of course, they are working together...
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Don't know about OUR ocean tides, but I do know a few whalers that would be annoyed.
Darker than coal? (Score:2)
How does a radio telescope image tell us that an object is "darker than coal"? Unless they meant "Has radio reflectivity less than that of coal"?
I have a bad feeling about this... (Score:2)
Deep Space Network (Score:2)
I always assumed that the DSN antennas were used for spacecraft communications only, had no idea they were used for radio and radar astronomy as well.
Catch it!!! (Score:2)
Damn, if we had any real space capability in the US, 42 years after we walked on the Moon, we'd have been waiting to go out and catch the sucker, and bring it into a stable orbit at geosync. Then we'd have a *real* space station, to handle all kinds of communication, to beam solar power down, and as a station for interplanetary ships....
mark
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Why would have a big asteroid in orbit make any of those things easier ?
And how much fuel would it cost to capture the sucker ?
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Accuse it of having downloaded a Lady Gaga track.
Ying Lim...are those Slugs or Newtons (Score:1)
I'm reviewing your trajectory data, Just wanted to double check... I'm sure the astroid is going to miss us, but wanted to double triple check, you remember that probe that sort-of hit mars?
So your measurements of the acceleration were in inches per second, and slugs of force right? Thats what we have been using here at NASA, we never managed to convert to the metric system in the '70s.
As far as I can tell, this things going to miss us by a mile right? Or was that a kilo
Darn (Score:2)
Doesn't look anything like a spaceship.
to paraphrase an old newspaper photog (Score:2)
whose name sadly I cannot look up at this time...
I started shooting the tornado with my 600 mm lens, then switched to the 500, then the 300. when I reached for the 24mm, I decided I had better get out of there
actual story in the NPPA magazine in the late 70s.
Aircraft Carrier (Score:2)
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Believe it or not... [google.com]
Or 4 Libraries of Congress (off to the left)
It will hit OK. (Score:3)
Here in Oklahoma, in the last 24 hours, we've had tornadoes, floods, and another earthquake. I'm not liking the looks of this asteroid thing.
What if... (Score:1)
If this thing was going to hit the Earth, is there any organisation or government who has a plan to deal with an asteroid impact threat?
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I vote for Bruce Willis. He did alright the last time around in that other documentary with Sharpe and that Arwen chick.
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God damn it, learn to hit Preview and read your own posts.
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Hang on, did you just confuse Sean Bean and Steve Buscemi?
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Mmmmm... Elfin ears.
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WTG Discovery with your asinine, needlessly fear-mongering video clip headline:
Discovery News Videos: Space: Doomsday Asteroid
Somebody should be fired...
There was a time I when I really liked Discovery, but they have been becoming the Crap channel with a lot of their junk. Guess thinking isn't encouraged there. Thoughtful, interesting programming is pushed aside for more visceral stuff.
Getting the same feeling about Sirius/XM, which had such a bright beginning, now they're adopting all the idiotic practices I so despise of broadcast radio stations. Must be some disease in the media - brought about from sitting in studios too long and not getting out among
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Yeah. Windows is coming to the maniframe [slashdot.org] and all they can find to whine about is one measly killer asteroid.
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That just means you don't get the reference.
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and for those who still don't, the reference is Eon [wikipedia.org], a pretty good novel by Greg Bear
and interestingly, while looking up the wikipedia page for that, I notice that Google says it is Edmund Halleys birthday today.. can it really be a coincidence that an asteroid flies past on this day? I think not..
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It's full of anonymous assholes, too. Apparently.