March 28, 2013 By 1 Comment

Meteor Strike Airs On NOVA (PBS)

meteor-strike-viNOVA’s timely and exceptional television program, “Meteor Strike”, aired on March 27 and is available to view online.

The program features interviews with two members of B612′s Board of Directors: Chair Emeritus and Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart and Dan Durda, Principal Scientist in the Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) Dept. of Space Studies in Boulder, Colorado.

Watch Meteor Strike on PBS. See more from NOVA.

Program Description

A blinding flash of light streaked across the Russian sky, followed by a shuddering blast strong enough to damage buildings and send more than 1,000 people to the hospital. On the morning of February 15, 2013, a 7,000-ton asteroid crashed into the Earth’s atmosphere. According to NASA, the Siberian meteor exploded with the power of 30 Hiroshima bombs and was the largest object to burst in the atmosphere since the Tunguska event of 1908, which was also in Siberia and left few eyewitnesses or clues. This time, the event was captured by digital dashboard cameras, now common in Russian autos and trucks. Within days, NOVA crews joined impact scientists in Russia as they hunted for clues about the meteor’s origin and makeup. From their findings, it’s clear we came close to a far worse disaster, which NOVA sets in perspective by looking at greater explosions from the past, including Tunguska and the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. “Meteor Strike” asks: Is our solar system a deadly celestial shooting gallery with Earth in the crosshairs? And what are the chances that another, more massive asteroid is heading straight for us?

Note: video may take a few seconds to load, thank you for your patience.

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March 26, 2013 By Leave a Comment

A Clearer View of the Space Bullet That Grazed Russia

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YouTube Videos Unlock Meteor’s Secrets: Scientists around the world have been using videos made by regular citizens and uploaded to YouTube to figure out where in space the meteor that exploded over Russia on Feb. 15 came from.
Courtesy of The New York Times.

From today’s New York Times, “A Clearer View of the Space Bullet That Grazed Russia”:

The people of Chelyabinsk were very lucky,” Edward Lu, a former astronaut who now leads the B612 Foundation, a private initiative to detect similar asteroids, said at a Congressional hearing last week about the space threats.

You can read the entire piece here.

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March 18, 2013 By 4 Comments

So how big are these NEOs anyway?

DA14, stadium

 

Sometimes it’s challenging to visualize a space object on a human scale. Artist Michael Carroll created this image size comparison of 2012DA14 (on the left) and the Chelyabinsk meteroid (on the right) shown here give us a more  understandable representation of how large the recent NEOs that have passed Earth have been.

You can read more about the size of DA14 from this JPL press release.

About the artist:

Michael Carroll is a science journalist and astronomical artist, with over twenty books in print. He has written articles for such magazines as Sky & Telescope, Astronomy, Popular Science, Asimov’s, Analog, Clubhouse, Odyssey, Sea Frontiers, and Artists magazines. His latest book is Drifting on Alien Winds. It explores the weather of other planets and moons. Other recent books include Alien Volcanoes (Johns Hopkins University Press), The Seventh Landing (Springer), and Space Art (Random House). His next book, Alien Seas, is slated for a fall 2013 release.

Carroll is a Fellow and founding member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists. He has done work for Lockheed/Martin, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His art has appeared in several hundred magazines throughout the world, including AVIATION WEEK & SPACE TECHNOLOGY, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, TIME, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, SKY & TELESCOPE, and others. One of his original paintings flew aboard MIR, and another is on the surface of Mars—in digital form—aboard the Phoenix spacecraft. He is the recipient of the Lucien Rudaux award for lifetime achievement in the astronomical arts, and the Jonathan Eberhart award for science feature writing. You can see more of his art at his website: http://stock-space-images.com

 

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March 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

The Death of a Meteor

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Polarized light shows that the Chebarkul meteorite contains melted and recrystallized material. VALERIY MELNIKOV/RIA NOVOSTI

“Inside some of the rocky shards are glassy veins, perhaps created during the impact that broke the object away from its mother asteroid many million years ago.” Forensic study of the Russian meteor that exploded over the Urals last month. Cool stuff! You can read the rest here: http://www.nature.com/news/the-death-of-the-chebarkul-meteor-1.12540

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March 6, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Divers find Russian meteorite craters

Lake Chebarkul, where pieces of the meteor that exploded over the Urals on Feb. 15, 2013 (RIA Novosti)

Lake Chebarkul, where pieces of the meteor that exploded over the Urals on Feb. 15, 2013 (RIA Novosti)

“Divers searching Chebarkul Lake in Russia’s Urals region have found several craters that may be the impact zones of fragments of the now-famous meteorite that exploded over the area on February 15.” Read more about their discovery here: http://rt.com/news/russian-meteorite-lake-craters-537/ 

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February 15, 2013 By 20 Comments

Ed Lu’s Message: Our Cosmic Challenge

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images courtesy of independent.co.uk, thesun.co.uk, cnn.com

 

The B612 Foundation believes we should find threatening asteroids before they find us. Today’s meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk is a wake-up call that the Earth orbits the Sun in a shooting gallery of asteroids, and that these asteroids sometimes hit the Earth. Later today, a separate and larger asteroid, 2012 DA14, narrowly missed the Earth passing beneath the orbits of our communications satellites. We have the technology to deflect asteroids, but we cannot do anything about the objects we don’t know exist. To date, less than 1% of asteroids larger than the one that leveled Tunguska in 1908 have been tracked. The B612 Foundation Sentinel Space Telescope, to be launched in 2018, will provide a comprehensive map of the locations and trajectories of threatening asteroids and will give humanity the decades of warning needed to prevent asteroid impacts with existing technology. By the end of its planned lifetime, Sentinel will have discovered well over 90% of the asteroids that could destroy entire regions of Earth on impact (those larger than 350ft in diameter) and more than 50% of the currently unknown DA14-like near-Earth asteroids.

The B612 Foundation has undertaken this Sentinel project as a non-governmental initiative, somewhat akin to a growing number of private space ventures originated in the past few years. The foundation, however, is not undertaking this project for profit; we are a non-profit corporation. Our motivation is strictly to ensure the survival of life on Earth – all of it. And while NASA is cooperating with us by providing certain communication and analytic services, we are excited, as a private venture, to welcome the participation of all the crew of Spaceship Earth in this great endeavor.

Does the crew of Spaceship Earth raise our awareness and accept responsibility for our voyage into the future? Or do we sit back as passengers, comfortably assuming that there must be a captain and crew doing this job on our behalf?

The B612 Sentinel mission is testament to our belief that we, together, are responsible for the future of life on our small planet; we invite you to join us in addressing this cosmic challenge.

*****

B612′s co-founder and Chair Emeritus Rusty Schweickart has an important op-ed posted today in The Guardian. Please take a moment to read his thoughts, too.

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