As the attention on Asteroid 2012 DA14′s flyby increases this week, we asked our friend and B612′s Board Director Dan Durda to share some of his thoughts on this event. 

The ‘close shave’ flyby of 2012 DA14 on February 15 provides a clear reminder that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery of rocky visitors from the main asteroid belt.  These objects represent both threat and great promise – a population of potentially hazardous projectiles but also they keys to understanding planetary origins and destinations for future exploration and resource utilization.

Near-Earth asteroids like 2012 DA14 originated from main-belt parents through a complex history of collisional and dynamical processes, delivering to near-Earth space free samples of the fossils of planetary formation.  The asteroids are the battered remains of inner Solar System planetesimals that were the building blocks of the growing terrestrial planets 4.5 billion years ago.  As such, they provide planetary scientists crucial insights into the properties of planet-building materials and the processes that brought them together during that long-ago era.  Meteorites are free samples of these objects, delivered to Earth literally every day.  The mineralogical treasures they contain for meteoriticists attempting to read the pages of Earth’s formative history make some of them worth more than their weight in gold.

So, there is intrinsic, curiosity-driven scientific interest in flybys as close as this one by DA14.  We get the chance to learn a bit more about the properties of some specific asteroids.  What is it shaped like?  Is it a solid fragment of a larger parent asteroid, liberated in a violent impact long ago?  Or is it a pile of rubble, itself battered to bits by impacts with still smaller near-Earth asteroids?  How will Earth’s tidal forces during the flyby affect its spin state, and what might those changes further tell us about its internal structure?  Is there any loose material on its surface, a regolith of impact-fragmented ‘soil’ on this little airless world?  At only some 45 meters across, DA14 lives in that nebulous transition zone between very small asteroid and very large meteoroid – and we still know very little of even the most basic properties of such objects.

But there are very practical reasons for turning our eye to this passing object as well.  This close approach could just as easily have been an impact.  With many tens of thousands of undiscovered objects this size roaming our neighborhood it’s only a matter of time before one of them booms through our atmosphere rather than skating through our planet-circling constellation of satellites.  Rather than playing the odds of time, wouldn’t it be far better to be able to know, with some reasonable certainty, that we’ve cataloged the entire population of potentially hazardous asteroids?  With such a catalog in hand we’d either know we’re safe from disastrous impacts for the foreseeable future or at least be able to plan ahead for any known to be on our near-term cosmic planning calendar.  A happy additional benefit of such a catalog would be to provide a list of the most reachable targets for future robotic and human exploration and for mining the riches of already-in-space mineral resources to help support that exploration.

The B612 Foundation’s Sentinel Mission will play a crucial role in making just such a catalog a reality.  And you can help make it happen!

Dan is the Principal Scientist in the Department of Space Studies of the Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. He has more than 20 years experience researching the collisional and dynamical evolution of main-belt and near-Earth asteroids, Vulcanoids, Kuiper belt comets, and interplanetary dust. He is an active pilot, with time logged in over a dozen types of aircraft including the F/A-18 Hornet and the F-104 Starfighter, and was a 2004 NASA astronaut selection finalist. Durda is one of three SwRI payload specialists who will fly on multiple suborbital spaceflights on Virgin Galactic’s Enterprise and XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx.

Dan also has an interesting connection to the DA14 story. Up until recently Dan served for over a decade as The Planetary Society’s Shoemaker NEO grant program grants coordinator. Due in part because of a grant from this program, the La Sagra Observatory in Spain discovered 2012 DA14!