Thursday, September 29th ~ NASA to Make Announcement On Near-Earth Asteroids ...

September 26, 2011

NASA to Make Announcement On Near-Earth Asteroids

NASA says it will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT (6 p.m. GMT) on Thursday to reveal near-Earth asteroid findings and implications for future research.

The briefing will take place at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, launched in December 2009, captured millions of images of galaxies and objects in space. During the news conference, panelists will discuss results from an enhancement of WISE called Near-Earth Object WISE (NEOWISE) that hunted for asteroids.

The news conference panelists will include Lindley Johnson, Near-Earth Object program executive, NASA Headquarters, Washington; Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California; Tim Spahr, director, Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Lucy McFadden, scientist, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

It remains unclear at this point whether NASA will reveal further information about a near-earth asteroid that is scheduled to pass between the moon and earth later this year.

The 1300-foot-wide (400 metres) asteroid, which is more than one and a half times the length of a soccer pitch, will pass within 0.85 lunar distances of the Earth on November 8, 2011.



Discovered on December 28, 2005 by Robert McMillan of the Spacewatch Program near Tucson, Arizona, 2005 YU55 is believed to be a very dark, nearly spherical object.

According to NASA’s Near Earth Object Program: “Although classified as a potentially hazardous object, 2005 YU55 poses no threat of an Earth collision over at least the next 100 years. However, this will be the closest approach to date by an object this large that we know about in advance and an event of this type will not happen again until 2028 when asteroid (153814) 2001 WN5 will pass to within 0.6 lunar distances.”

While neither the European Space Agency (ESA) nor NASA has suggested that YU55 poses a threat to Earth, plans to develop a mission to counteract a potential asteroid collision in the future are already underway.

The Daily Mail reported on Tuesday that the ESA is planning to fire an ‘impactor’ satellite into a ‘test’ asteroid in 2015 to see if the object’s trajectory can be altered. The Agency is conducting the test mission in light of the minimal threat posed by the 700-1100-foot-wide 99942 Apophis asteroid, which has a one in 250,000 chance of impacting Earth in 2036.

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