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NASA | Asteroid Day: When is it and why do we celebrate it?

When we think of asteroids, large masses of stone come to our imagination that stalk the landThis is partly the case, but those rocks that roam space are also a source of scientific and technological wealth.

Raising awareness among the population about the opportunities and challenges that these objects represent is the mission of Asteroid day, which is celebrated every June 30, date in 1908, a meteorite caused serious damage in Tunguska (Siberia), where it devastated 2,000 square meters of taiga.

The asteroids are the remains of the birth of the planets of the Solar system and many are fragments of tiny protoplanets that never reached maturity, so their study is vital to understand the origin of our home in the universe.

“I see them as a source of scientific and technological wealth,” he says to Eph the astrophysicist Josep Maria Trigo, from the CSIC Institute of Space Sciences and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia.

More than 75% of asteroids they are of the chondritic type. Amalgams of the primordial materials that condensed around the Sun 4.565 million years ago and, he explains, “contain the fossil remains of those early times, being rich in metals, rare earths, and some of them, even in primordial water.”

This year is special, because the return of the Japanese probe is expected in December Hayabusa 2 that, after six years of mission, will come back with snippets of Ryugu, a asteroid 900 meters in diameter located 280 million kilometers from the land.

When the pieces can be examined, it is hoped to obtain “a pleiad of information”, as has already happened with the samples that Hayabusa brought from the asteroid Itokawa a decade ago, says Wheat, whose team was the only Spanish who could examine them and aspires to do the same with those of Ryugu.

But this is not the only asteroid that can be analyzed, because in three years the Osiris Rex mission of the NASA with material from Determining.

These two missions are an “exciting” moment, in the words of Javier Licandro, from the Canary Islands Institute of Astrophysics (IAC), who participated last week in one of the virtual talks organized by the European Space Agency (ESA) on the occasion of Asteroid day.

Hayabusa 2 and Osiris Rex they are “complementary missions” that “are already giving surprising results,” said Lycandro, explaining that on the surface of the asteroids it was expected that there would be a lot of dust, but in reality they are “basically a scree,” which made finding a place for the Japanese probe will land.

Meteorites, fragments of rocky bodies that reach the land, can also contribute to the exploration of Mars, Wheat highlights.

In the analysis of the Martian meteorite ALH 84001, about 4.1 billion years old and discovered in Antarctica in 1984, the Wheat team found evidence of water.

This is just one example of the meteorites that enter our atmosphere each year, where they are normally destroyed, although some overcome that barrier and fall to Earth. The most famous is Chicxulub, which 66 million years ago hit the Gulf of Mexico and killed the dinosaurs.

And is that, “dinosaurs did not have a space agency“, as an old and ironic slogan of the THAT printed on some of their shirts.

The risk of such a rock reaching the land It is not large, but there are many others smaller and potentially dangerous, so there are identification and monitoring programs, and planetary defense projects are being launched.

Over the past two decades “tremendous progress has been made” in identifying the asteroids in the region near the land, Wheat highlights, but the important thing now is to complete the search for those small objects.

75% of objects between a kilometer and 300 meters in diameter are already known, but between 300 and 100 meters we know only 15%, a percentage that drops to 0.5% for those between 100 and 30 meters, he adds the astronomer, who highlights that the meteorite of Tunguska believed to have been no more than 50 meters.

But will it be possible one day to divert a asteroid that threatens Earth? That is the objective of the planetary defense missions of the THAT and the NASA, than they have their sights set on the asteroid Didymos, which is orbited by a smaller one called Dimorphos, whose size is similar to an Egyptian pyramid.

The probe will travel to this binary asteroid system in two years DART from NASA, which will make a hyper velocity kinetic impact against Dimorphos to try to vary its speed and deflect its course. “This seems the most consistent technique to apply with these small asteroids,” says Wheat.

Two years later, the Hera probe of the THAT He will visit “that fascinating binary system, to characterize both bodies and check the effects caused by the impact”.

EFE

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