Asteroid 2007 FF1 LIVE – NASA says ‘Hazardous’ space rock makes ‘close approach’ to Earth at 29,800mph

Asteroid-pulverizing system, part three

The professor's PI System is being designed to rocket up to a close asteroid and penetrate it with rods if necessary. Those rods would contain explosives that could be set off and tear the asteroid apart before it hit Earth.

Lubin would like the asteroid chunks to be less than 33 feet in diameter, should such an explosion need to occur.

Those space rocks should then form a cloud of debris that could still hit the Earth, but the hope is that a lot of it would break up in Earth's atmosphere instead.

The effectiveness of the PI System would depend on things like asteroid size and how close it is to Earth at the time of the "pulverizing."

Lubin says his system could even orbit Earth one day and be ready for any surprise doomsday asteroids that have the potential to come our way.

Asteroid-pulverizing system, continued

Prof Lubin thinks it would be our best chance of protecting Earth from a devastating asteroid collision.

According to , the professor previously presented his defense system at the 2021 Planetary Defence Conference and his idea got spotted by Nasa.

He's now a Phase One awardee in the Nasa Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program.

Lubin previously observed: "So far, humanity has been spared large-scale catastrophe as was visited upon our previous tenants, but counting upon being 'lucky' is a poor strategy in the longer term."

We don't want to go the way of the dinosaurs, after all.

Asteroid-pulverizing system

Professor Philip Lubin from the University of California Santa Barbara is making something he calls the PI-Terminal Defense for Humanity.

The PI part stands for "Pulverize It".

A simple explanation of the system is that a rocket with lots of explosive rods would approach a large incoming asteroid and smash it into tiny pieces.

Those small rocky pieces would then rain down on Earth and hopefully burn up in the atmosphere.

Youngest asteroids ever found in Solar System 

Researchers have found a pair of asteroids orbiting the Sun that was formed under 300 years ago.

Details of the Astronomical discovery were published in a  in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The twin asteroids – dubbed 2019 PR2 and 2019 QR6 – are the youngest found in our solar system.

“It’s very exciting to find such a young  pair that was formed only about 300 years ago, which was like this morning – not even yesterday – in astronomical timescales,” astronomer Petr Fatka of the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences said.

Largest asteroids: Interamnia

Interamnia  of 217.5 miles and circles the sun once every 1,950 days, or 5.34 years.

Because of its distance from Earth, it is not believed feasible to investigate Interamnia.

Largest asteroids: Hygeia

With a diameter of 270 miles, .

It is a large asteroid in the main belt, but due to its almost spherical form, it may soon be classified as a dwarf planet.

It will be the tiniest dwarf planet in our solar system if it achieves this status.

The asteroid was discovered in 1849 by astronomer Annibale de Gasparis.

Hygiea’s orbit does not bring it close to Earth, hence it is not considered potentially dangerous.

Largest asteroids: Pallas

 in 1802 and named after the Greek goddess of wisdom.

It has a diameter of around 318 miles and accounts for about 7 percent of the asteroid belt’s total mass.

Pallas’ orbit, unlike those of other asteroids, is severely inclined at 34.8 degrees, making it difficult to analyze.

Largest asteroids: Vesta

Vesta is the  asteroid in the main asteroid belt and the biggest official asteroid.

Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovered it in 1807.

Vesta has a diameter of 329 miles and makes up nearly 9 percent of the total mass of all asteroids.

Vesta, like Earth, is spherical and has three layers: crust, mantle, and core.

Largest asteroids: Ceres

Ceres is the  in the belt between Mars and Jupiter and was the first found in 1801, even thought to be a planet at the time.

In the 1850s, it was categorized as an asteroid, but in 2006, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

While it is no longer classified as an asteroid, it claims the top rank with a diameter of 580 miles.

Ceres is named after the Roman goddess of corn and harvests, and the term cereal comes from the same root.

Ceres took 1,682 Earth days, or 4.6 years, to complete one round around the sun.

Every nine hours, it completes one rotation around its axis.

What is the current asteroid count?

According to , the current known asteroid count is 1,113,527.

Other recent asteroid approaches

When it comes to other recent asteroid approaches, Asteroid 2022 ES3 passed between the Moon and Earth at around 2.18pm ET on Sunday, March 13,  reported.

And Asteroid 2015 DR215 flew past Earth in the early hours of March 11.

How do asteroids get their names?

When it comes to , the International Astronomical Union’s Committee on Small Body Nomenclature is lenient.

As a result, there’s a massive space rock named Mr Spock circling the Sun after the Star Trek figure.

There is also another space rock named after rock musician Frank Zappa.

There are even more solemn memorials, like the seven asteroids named after the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which perished in 2003.

Asteroids are also given names based on places and other things, according to NASA.

Largest known asteroids

The largest asteroids in our solar system are chunks of space debris that have shaped the space around them.

This is a list of :

• Ceres (583.7 miles/ 939.4 kilometers)
• Vesta (326 miles/ 525 kilometers)
• Pallas (318 miles/ 513 kilometers)
• Hygiea (270 miles/ 444 kilometers)
• Interamnia (196.7 miles/ 306 kilometers)
• 52 Europa (188.9 miles/ 306 kilometers)

Will Asteroid 2013 BO76 come this close again?

"Orbital predictions show the space rock will not come so close to Earth again until the year 2193 — which is when the data runs out," reported.

Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?

The extinction of the dinosaurs was definitely caused by an asteroid impact, a team of scientists who were evaluating whether the newer theory that volcanoes led to their demise was accurate claimed.

The researchers used a variety of methods to assess ancient temperature records and the amount of greenhouse gases that could have been in the atmosphere.

According to the study results, volcanic gasses may have still played a role in the decline of the dinosaurs.

Saving Earth from asteroids, continued

Nasa : "DART is the first-ever mission dedicated to investigating and demonstrating one method of asteroid deflection by changing an asteroid’s motion in space through kinetic impact."

The DART craft should hit a small asteroid called Dimorphos in September with the ultimate aim of moving it off course.

Saving Earth from asteroids

Some experts are worried that Earth isn't yet ready to defend itself from potentially deadly asteroids.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk once sparked concern when he tweeted: "a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense."

Nasa is looking into having some defense methods set up, however.

It recently launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission.

Nasa upgrades asteroid software, part three

The Sentry-II software will finally let scientists take the Yarkovsky effect into account when they're trying to figure out if an asteroid is going to hit Earth.

This was something the original software, called Sentry, couldn't do.

Davide Farnocchia, a JPL navigation engineer, said: "The fact that Sentry couldn't automatically handle the Yarkovsky effect was a limitation."

Nasa upgrades asteroid software, continued

Nasa will be upgrading its 20-year-old software with a new algorithm called Sentry-II, which will periodically scan a table of known potentially hazardous asteroids and their orbits.

Sentry-II will then calculate if any of the asteroids on the table or added to the table have a risk of hitting Earth.

The new system will be taking into account something called the Yarkovsky effect, which refers to when an asteroid absorbs sunlight and emits it as heat.

Nasa upgrades asteroid software

NASA has upgraded its asteroid hazard software to better detect potentially dangerous space rocks.

The US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) uses a special type of software to assess potentially hazardous asteroids that could slam into Earth.

There's no known imminent "doomsday asteroid" on its way but astronomers check the sky often just as a precaution.

The probability of a collision

In a statement about the , Nasa wrote that it, "knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small."

"In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years."

NEO mission

Nasa is hoping to launch its Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission in 2026.

If the agency does so, it will finally have a spacecraft dedicated only to hunting asteroids.

The hope is that the NEO Surveyor craft will find 90 percent of asteroids that are 460 feet or larger within the first decade of its mission.

What is a NEO?

Nasa considers anything passing near Earth's orbit a Near-Earth Object (NEO).

Thousands of NEOs are tracked by scientists to monitor whether they're on a collision course with our planet.

Nasa monitors thousands of asteroids

Nasa has its eye on nearly 28,000 known near-Earth asteroids, and discoveries of new asteroids are said to go up by their thousands each year.

On that note, Nasa is hoping to launch its Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission in 2026.

What is the Main Asteroid Belt?

The  between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, with relatively short orbits.

There are between 1.1 and 1.9million asteroids bigger than one kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter in the belt, as well as millions of smaller ones.

The gravity of freshly created Jupiter stopped the development of planetary bodies in this region early in the solar system's existence, causing the tiny things to smash with one another, fragmenting them into the asteroids we see today.