Discovery of New Asteroid
The University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey has discovered an asteroid, one that involves a one-in-75 chance of it hitting Mars on January 30 according to scientists who are tracking it. Designated 2007 WD5, the asteroid was discovered by Catalina Sky Survey Team member, Andrea Boattini using a UA’s Mount Lemmon 60-inch telescope in the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson on November 20. When discovered the asteroid was at 20th magnitude brightness.
According to survey team member, Ed Beshore, it is 400,000 times fainter than the faintest object most people can see with their naked eye on a dark night. Since its discovery, the asteroid is 16 times dimmer. According to astronomers who were monitoring the trajectory of the asteroid, they estimate it to 164 feet wide.
The object may pass within 30,000 miles of Mars at about 6:00 A.M. EST on January 30, 2008. This information was provided through observations of astronauts and analyzed by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The asteroid, which is approaching Mars, is possibly a stony asteroid as most asteroids are. It is the size of the object that blasted out Meteor Crater, Arizona 50,000 years ago. That asteroid is believed to have been a metallic asteroid, more like a ball bearing than like a rock. It has been calculated, by scientists to be traveling at 8 miles on second, or 15 times faster than a rifle bullet.
In 1908, an object exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, with the energy of a three megaton bomb and asteroid 2007 WD5 is being compared to that scenario. According to NASA, if the event does occur, it would hit within a broad swath across the northern part of the planet where the Opportunity rover is located.
“We estimate such impacts occur on Mars every thousand years or so”, Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a NASA news release. “If 2007 WD5 were to thump Mars on January 30, we calculate it would hit at about 30,000 miles per hour and might create a crater more than a half-a-mile wide.”
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is mapping the planet, would have a front-row seat, Chesley added. The High Resolution Imaging Experiment, or HiRISE, operates the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet. It is part of the orbiter’s science payload. “If the asteroid hits Mars, we’ll get a great look at the crater within a few days of impact”, HiRISE principal investigator, Alfred S. McEwen of UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said. A
ll records for discoveries of near-earth objects, or NEO’s, for any NEO survey this year were broken by the Catalina Sky Survey. In 2007, the survey found 450 NEO’s although, when a final count is in, the number will rise slightly. In 2006, 400 NEO discoveries were reported and 310 NEO discoveries in 2005.
NASA is funding four surveys, of which CSS (Catalina Sky Survey) is one. They will carry out a United States Congressional mandate to find a catalog at least ninety percent of all near-earth objects larger than one kilometer across (Six-tenths of a mile) by the end of 2008. “The impact of a kilometer-diameter asteroid would have global consequences to civilization as we know it”, said Larson. If an object even a third as large would hit earth, it would explode twenty-four times the energy of the world’s largest thermo-nuclear bomb explosion, a 58 megaton Soviet bomb exploded in 1961. Larson added that, although impacts of these NEO’s are rare, we can, for the first time, quantify any potential danger as the first step in possibly mitigating a disaster.
This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 5:01 am and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
