Asteroid

Wouldn't you know it? The very day we get the "Year 2000 Problem" solved--Oct. 28, 2028--an asteroid will probably wipe it all out. CAROL P. BARTOLD Glendale

It's 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sooty black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby. Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT. Scientists are not sure where this unusually large space rock, which was discovered 15 years ago, originated from. But the mysterious sooty substance on its surface could indicate it may be the result of a comet that flew too close to the sun, said Amy Mainzer, who tracks near-Earth objects at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge . It might also have leaked out of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, she said.

Doomsday in 2036 just got a lot less likely. After recalculating the trajectory of the asteroid Apophis, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge have determined that the odds of it hitting the Earth that year are only four in a million. "We've all but ruled out" a collision in 2036, said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office at JPL. Previously, the odds had been calculated at one in 45,000, Chesley said. While that doesn't sound like a very big danger, Apophis has been the greatest worry since 2004 for scientists who track threats from space.

Asteroid (101955)1999 RQ36 doesn't really roll off the tongue, but asteroid Bennu? That's an asteroid that a person, a country and the world can get excited about. This week, NASA announced that 9-year-old Michael Toler Puzio of North Carolina had won an international student contest to name the asteroid that NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission plans to sample in 2019. The third-grader's entry, Bennu, is the name of an avian deity in ancient Egypt that often takes the form of a blue heron.

It's 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sooty black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby. Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT. Scientists are not sure where this unusually large space rock, which was discovered 15 years ago, originated from. But the mysterious sooty substance on its surface could indicate it may be the result of a comet that flew too close to the sun, said Amy Mainzer, who tracks near-Earth objects at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge . It might also have leaked out of the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, she said.

Talk about your cosmic pileups. An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November. The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75. A 1-in-75 shot is "wildly unusual," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth's neighborhood.

The possibility of a collision between Mars and an approaching asteroid has been effectively ruled out, according to scientists watching the space rock. Tracking measurements of asteroid 2007 WD5 taken from four observatories have greatly reduced uncertainties about its Jan. 30 close approach to Mars. The odds of impact have dropped to 1 in 10,000, the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a website posting Thursday. Scientists now estimate that the asteroid will pass between 16,000 and 2,480 miles from Mars' surface.

For the first time, scientists have matched a meteorite found on Earth with a specific asteroid that became a fireball plunging through the sky. The small asteroid blew up in the sky in October; a search through the Sudan desert turned up 8.7 pounds of black, jagged rocks, pieces of the asteroid. The report was published Thursday in the journal Nature.

It's official: The extinction of the dinosaurs and a host of other species 65.5 million years ago was caused by a massive asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, creating worldwide havoc, an international team of researchers said Thursday. The 7.5-mile-wide asteroid was traveling at a speed about 10 times that of a rifle bullet when it hit, releasing a billion times more energy than the Hiroshima atom bomb. The impact blew dirt and rock around the world, set massive wildfires, knocked down forests worldwide, triggered massive tsunamis and earthquakes of magnitude 11 or larger and even caused parts of the continent to slip into the ocean.

An asteroid half a mile wide, blazing through space at nearly 50,000 m.p.h., skirted past Earth last month in a cosmic "close call" unrivaled in the last 50 years, NASA officials said Wednesday. The asteroid, identified as 1989FC, passed within 500,000 miles of Earth--about twice the distance to the moon--on March 23, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration reported. "On the cosmic scale of things, that was a close call," said Dr. Henry Holt, an amateur astronomer from Flagstaff, Ariz.

WASHINGTON - As if you don't have enough to worry about, consider the subject of a Capitol Hill hearing Wednesday: asteroids that may be headed toward Earth. The good news: NASA is tracking most of the largest asteroids - the kind that a witness said "would likely end civilization" were they to hit. "None of these civilization-enders thus far discovered is known to be on an impact course any time in this upcoming century," Ed Lu, a former astronaut who heads a group working to launch a space telescope to track threatening asteroids, told the House Space, Science and Technology Committee.

How do you capture an asteroid that is zipping through space, move it into a stable orbit around the Earth-moon system stable enough that an astronaut can visit it? NASA has some ideas. In a new video released Wednesday, the space agency illustrates how its Asteroid Retrieval Initiative might work. The video was released just as NASA disclosed its 2014 budget proposal, which includes $105 million to study the feasibility of capturing an asteroid 23 to 32 feet in diameter. The animation is cool to look at -- an unmanned spacecraft flies into space, and releases what looks like a giant layered garbage bag out its rear.

Bruce Willis and his asteroid-fighting abilities in “Armageddon” may have been the star of a Senate hearing this week, but giant space rocks are only one of the many dangers that human civilization must tackle, researchers said on Capitol Hill. Our complex web of technology is at risk on an everyday basis, said Richard DalBello, a vice president at Intelsat General and a witness at the subcommittee hearing on space threats.   “We have to daily deal with a range of threats,” he said.

Faced with space debris, solar weather and giant space rocks, senators at a subcommittee hearing called for backup in the form of a fictitious asteroid-hunter as they discussed the many space-born threats Earth faces. "I was disappointed that Bruce Willis was not available to be a fifth witness on the panel," joked Ted Cruz (R-Texas) during Wednesday morning's hearing. "There probably is no doubt that actually Hollywood has done more to focus attention on this issue than perhaps a thousand congressional hearings could do,” he added.

The 10-ton meteor that streaked into Earth's atmosphere at 40,000 mph and exploded above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk was a reminder that the universe is not such a hospitable place. Still, though hundreds of people were injured and thousands of windows were shattered, no one died and repairs can be made. By comparison, the terrestrial havoc wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the northeastern United States was far more devastating.  In the movies, when humanity is faced with imminent doom, whether from a massive asteroid or an invasion of space monsters, the people of the world forget their differences, band together and save themselves.

Earth dodged a gigantic space bullet Friday when the 143,000-ton asteroid known as 2012 DA14 came within 17,200 miles of the Indian Ocean. Scientists and engineers are looking for ways to head off such close calls by targeting potentially dangerous asteroids well before they're in a position to do us any harm. A group called the B612 Foundation (a reference to the home asteroid of the Little Prince in the classic French novella) recently announced a mission to build a spacecraft that would track dangerous midsize asteroids, and a fledgling company called Deep Space Industries has floated a plan to build swarms of robots that could mine - and even destroy - space rocks.

An asteroid about the size of one that leveled more than 800 square miles of forest in Siberia a century ago just buzzed the Earth. The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles away when it zipped by Monday, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge reported. That is just twice as high as the orbits of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the moon. "This was pretty darn close," astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said.

MOSCOW - Without warning, a celestial object that NASA described as a "tiny asteroid" streaked above Russia's Ural Mountains early Friday before exploding, creating a shock wave that rattled buildings, shattered glass and injured hundreds of people. Many witnesses in Chelyabinsk said they saw a white trail across the sky and a bright flash and heard a loud explosion seconds before buildings in the eastern part of the city were jolted. Scientists said it was the largest such event in more than a century, since a blast that leveled 800 square miles of forest in 1908, the so-called Tunguska event, also in Siberia.

The meteor that blazed over a portion of Russia early Friday, blasting windows and triggering car alarms with a series of explosive booms, was not related to asteroid 2012 DA14 and had a very different trajectory, according to scientists at NASA. As numerous videos of the event were viewed worldwide, experts said the meteor was likely about one-third the size of 2012 DA14, too small to track and therefore a surprise. The largest noise heard on video of the event was likely the main mass of the meteor exploding 100,000 to 150,000 feet above the Earth's surface, and not a sonic boom, scientists said.