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

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.

Asteroid longer than 4 blue whales

Asteroid 2007 FF1 is characterized as being "a minimum of four times the size of a blue whale" by the

Asteroid longer than 4 blue whales

Asteroid 2007 FF1 is characterized as being "a minimum of four times the size of a blue whale" by the

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 a meteorite?

If a meteoroid enters the Earth’s atmosphere, it begins to vaporize and becomes a meteor.

On Earth, it’ll look like a streak of light in the sky, because the rock is burning up, and it may look like a fireball or “shooting star.”

If a meteoroid doesn’t vaporize completely and survives the trip through Earth’s atmosphere, however, it can land on Earth and becomes a meteorite.

Difference between asteroids, meteors, and comets, part three

Like asteroids, a comet orbits the Sun.

However, rather than being made mostly of rock, a comet contains lots of ice and gas, which can result in amazing tails forming behind them as a result of the ice and dust vaporizing.

“They range from a few miles to tens of miles wide, but as they orbit closer to the Sun, they heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet,”  reported.

Difference between asteroids, meteors, and comets, continued

When two asteroids hit each other, the small chunks that break off are called meteoroids.

“Meteoroids are objects in space that range in size from dust grains to small asteroids. Think of them as ‘space rocks,'”  reported.

Difference between asteroids, meteors, and comets

An asteroid is a small rocky body that orbits the Sun.

They are “rocky, airless remnants left over from the early formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago,”  reveals.

Most are found in the asteroid belt (between Mars and Jupiter).

But they can be found anywhere, including in a path that can impact Earth.

Asteroid mystery solved, continued

Currently, the theory is that Ryugu originated from debris left by the collision of two larger asteroids, but that doesn’t explain why the asteroid is so high in organic content,  noted.

New findings published in  suggest Ryugu is, in fact, the remains of a dead or extinguished comet.

The new theory involves the comet losing its ice content in a way that could have ended up with it having the “unique characteristics” it does.

Lead author Miura told Newsweek: “Depending on whether Ryugu was originally an asteroid or a comet, it experienced a very different environment.”

“Asteroids formed in warm regions relatively close to the sun. On the other hand, comets formed in a cooler environment away from the sun.”

“To assume off the top of one’s head that Ryugu was originally an asteroid is to overlook the possibility that Ryugu may have been in a cold environment.”

Asteroid mystery solved?

Researchers may have “solved mysteries surrounding the origins of the spinning top-shaped asteroid Ryugu,”  reported.

In fact, it may actually be the remnants of a dead comet.

Space mission Hayabusa2 returned samples and images from the space rock Asteroid 162173, also known as Ryugu, in 2020.

It is classified as a potentially hazardous asteroid by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Objects Studies.

Data from that mission showed that the asteroid has a “spinning top shape,” and that it is “a loose pile of gravitationally bound rubble” with plentiful organic material.

What is an exoplanet?

Exoplanets are planets outside of our Solar System. Thousands have been discovered since the 1980s.

In addition to being possible locations of extraterrestrial life, they provide opportunities to better understand the evolution of the universe.

According to Nasa’s exoplanet , of the ten exoplanets found this year, six are larger than Jupiter.

TESS prediction

A paper  last month predicted the number of exoplanets that TESS will find over the course of its seven-year mission.

According to scientists, the agency’s exoplanet-hunting spacecraft will uncover upwards of 12,000 exoplanets by 2024.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology made their calculations using data collected by the $287million spacecraft to date.

What TESS has found so far

So far, TESS has found nearly 5,000 worlds of all shapes and sizes, including gas giants, Neptune-like ice worlds, and so-called Super-Earths.

A Super-Earth has a mass higher than our planet’s below those of the ice giants Uranus and Neptune.

The search for alien life

Launched four years ago, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a space telescope designed to search for undiscovered worlds.

It’s searching an area of sky 400 times larger than that covered by the Kepler mission, in a bid to find candidates that could host alien life.

How far was Asteroid 138971 from Earth?

It shot past us on March 4 from an estimated distance of 3million miles away.

In comparison, the Moon is only about 238,900 miles from us.

A few million miles may sound pretty far away but it's actually quite close in terms of space.

What is Asteroid 138971?

Asteroid 138971 (2001 CB21) was said to be up to 4,265 feet wide.

That made it almost three times as big as the Empire State Building.

The Empire State Building stands at around 1,453 feet tall so would pale in comparison to Asteroid 138971 (2001 CB21).

Nasa had put the asteroid on its "Earth Close Approaches" list.

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.

When is the next major asteroid close encounter?

Another major asteroid is expected to closely pass Earth on May 15, according to .

CNEOS data shows that asteroid 2012 UX68 will be about 654,000 miles away from Earth, which is about 2.7 times farther away than the moon.

The asteroid will have a maximum estimated diameter of around 300 feet.

2023 asteroid turns out to be safe

The  earlier this year sent scientists on an emotional roller coaster.

Astronomers at Arizona’s Mount Lemmon Observatory detected a 70-meter-wide asteroid on January 6, 2022.

Based on their early observations, this object looked to have a chance of colliding with Earth on its next visit, on July 4, 2023.

Because any ambiguities in an asteroid’s orbit are greatest in the hours following its discovery, astronomers from a variety of observatories hurried to perform follow-up observations.

Luckily, the asteroid was ruled not to be a threat.

London Eye-sized

 noted that the asteroid passing Earth last Thursday was "approximately three times larger than the London Eye.”