Meteor Swarms

[American Patriot]

You guys remember we had the Russian meteor and then we had other meteors hitting around the same time, as well as an asteroid that zipped past us on the same day?

Well... I am not alone in my thinking that those weren't coincidences.

Slooh To Broadcast Massive Lunar Asteroid Explosion

May 20, 2013

Image Credit: Thinkstock.com
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online


An organization aimed at bringing celestial event programming to everyone with a computer, iPhone or iPad is planning to broadcast the fiery explosion that took place on the moon just a few months ago.


On March 17 NASA astronomers witnessed how the Moon was rocked by a violent impact from an 88-pound asteroid, creating a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything the space agency had seen before. Now Slooh says it wants to bring the boulder-sized asteroid impact to a screen near you.


Slooh Space Camera will be broadcasting a free, real-time feed of the lunar impact site at Mara Imbrium on Wednesday starting at 9:00 p.m. eastern time. The broadcast will include live commentary from astronomer Bob Berman and a panel to discuss the event in the context of Near-Earth Objects that have missed our planet.


“Apparently, a number of brilliant fireballs tore through Earth’s atmosphere just as the lunar surface received a visible impact bright enough to create a one *second point of light, seen by anyone watching the Moon at that moment,” Berman, contributing editor and monthly columnist for Astronomy Magazine, said. “This suggests that a fairly dense swarm of meteoroids zipped through our orbit at that time, two months ago.”


The asteroid was traveling at 56,000 miles per hour when it made a crater of about 197 feet wide. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office said the small chunk of rock exploded with the force of 5 tons. According to the space agency, anyone looking at the moon at that moment would have been able to see the explosion with the naked eye because the flash glowed like a fourth magnitude star.


Cooke said a number of cameras picked up an unusual number of deep-penetrating meteors on the same night, so it is likely these fireballs are connected. He said this event “constitutes a short duration cluster of material encountered by the Earth-Moon system.”


NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will help get a good reading of the crash site area. Scientists will also be comparing the crater size to the explosion brightness to give researchers some valuable data that go into lunar impact models.


Some scientists believe that asteroid impacts on the Moon may have helped create its magnetic material. They wrote in the journal Science last year that an asteroid slammed into the Moon about 4 billion years ago and left behind iron-rich, highly magnetic rock.


“Because the fields in this area are stronger than those found in any normal lunar rocks, our hypothesis is that it isn’t lunar material,” said Sarah Stewart-Mukhopadhyay, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard and one of three co-authors of the paper. “We know the magnetic properties of asteroidal material are much higher than that of the Moon. It is possible that metallic iron from an asteroid could have been magnetized by the impact, and deposited on the Moon.”

[American Patriot]

With Russian Meteor Fresh In Everyone’s Memory, ESA Opens An Asteroid Monitoring Center

by Elizabeth Howell on May 23, 2013


The two main smoke trails left by the Russian meteorite as it passed over the city of Chelyabinsk. Credit: AP Photo/Chelyabinsk.ru



It’s been about three months since that infamous meteor broke up over Chelyabinsk, Russia. In that time, there’s been a lot of conversation about how we can better protect ourselves against these space rocks with a potentially fatal (from humanity’s perspective) gravitational attraction to Earth.


This week, the European Space Agency officially inaugurated a “NEO Coordination Centre” that is intended to be asteroid warning central in the European Union. It will be the hub for early warnings on near-Earth objects (hence the ‘NEO’ in the name) under ESA’s space situational awareness program.


ESA estimates that of the 600,000 asteroids and comets that orbit the Sun, about 10,000 of them are NEOs. (They define NEOs as asteroids or comets with sizes of several feet up to several tens of miles.)

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NASA, of course, is also gravely concerned about the threat NEOs present. Its administrator, Charles Bolden, talked about this at a Congressional hearing about asteroids in March.


Before delving into the threat, Bolden took a metaphorical deep breath to talk about the dozens of asteroids — a meter or larger — that slam into Earth’s atmosphere each year. Most of them burn up harmlessly, and further, 80 tons of dust-like material rain on Earth daily.


A notable meteor that did cause some damage took place about 100 years ago, in 1908, when an object broke up over an isolated area in Russia and flattened trees for miles. Bolden characterized that as a statistically one-in-a-thousand year event, but added that the “real catch” is this type of event could happen at any time.


NASA, however, is seeking out those that cause a threat. It is supposed to find 90 per cent of asteroids 140 meters or larger by 2020, and is making progress towards that goal. (By comparison, the Chelyabinsk object was estimated at 17 to 20 meters.)


Nine radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2007 PA8 obtained between by NASA’s 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna. The part of the asteroid closest to the antenna is at top. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech



So how to best monitor the threat? Bolden outlined a few ideas: crowdsourcing, coordinating with other federal agencies and making use of automatic feeds from different telescopes throughout the world (as NASA does right now.)


Bolden emphasized that none of the asteroids we have found is on a collision course with the Earth. Still, NASA and other science experts are not complacent.


In the same hearing, John Holdren — the president’s assistant on science and technology — recommended following a National Academy of Sciences report to spend upwards of $100 million a year on asteroid detection and characterization. To mitigate the threat, Holdren further recommended a visit to an asteroid by 2025, which would perhaps cost $2 billion.


Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/102364/...#ixzz2UgwQUU1Y

[American Patriot]

Explosion on the Moon: New crater created by meteoroid crashing into moon.

May 21, 2013 by Larry Rotolo Leave a Comment


Did you happen to be looking at the moon last March 17? If so, you would have seen the brightest impact explosion in at least the last eight years (since NASA began monitoring impacts on the side of the moon we can see), and maybe ever.


NASA has announced the occurrence and recording of the impact event on the moon, one of about 300 that have been added to the logs since the agency began recording such collisions in 2005. This in now counted as being the brightest, by several orders of magnitude.


Robert Suggs, speaking from the Lunar Impact Monitoring Program at Marshall Spaceflight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama, said, “We have seen a couple of others in the ‘wow’ category but not this bright.”


While shining for only one second, the blast was more than bright enough to be seen from the Earth without any telescope or binoculars.


NASA, of course, does not rely on the unaided eyes, but uses 14-inch telescopes to constantly monitor the moon’s visible surface. Once the recorded images from that particular moment on March 17 were analyzed, the meteorite that struck the moon was calculated to be 88 pounds in weight, and nearly one and a half feet in width. The rock was moving at 56,000 miles per hour when it struck the lunar surface. This crash resulted in the equivalent of five tons of TNT being released.




Researchers are now in the process of confirming the impact using records from cameras on spacecraft in close orbit around the moon. “They are planning to image that location in hopes of finding the crater which would be very significant scientifically,” Suggs said.


Simultaneous with the meteorite crash on the moon, an out of the ordinary number of brightly glowing meteors were recorded in the Earth’s atmosphere. Not part of any previously named meteor shower, NASA believes the Earth and moon together passed through a rain of rocky material that sprinkled both bodies with meteoroids.

Want to see for yourself? Check out this video. To cut out commentary, go to about :55 seconds into the video.



http://www.sdentertainer.com/news/ex...ing-into-moon/

[American Patriot]

Comet ISON may spark unprecedented meteor shower

• By Marshall Connolly, Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
• 5/17/2013
• Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Meteors will be too tiny to see but will produce electric blue, glowing clouds.


Comet ISON is likely to spark a rather strange meteor shower, unprecedented in recorded history. Astronomers now predict that the Earth will be bombarded with tiny particles of comet dust in mid-January following ISON's dive past the sun.




Noctilucent clouds are a rare, but beautiful phenomenon on Earth.





LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Comet ISON is set to be the comet of the century as it possibly brightens enough to outshine even the full moon. Much of that brightness will come from the hundreds of thousands of pounds of dust shed by the comet as the sun heats it up.

Already, ISON is shedding around 120,000 pounds of dust per minute. Comets that pass as close to the sun as ISON will shed even more dust.

Astronomers now believe the dust from ISON will eventually fall to Earth. Comet ISON wills peep past both sides of Earth as it makes its way around the sun. The dust it leaves behind will be pushed outward by the solar wind. Around January 12, astronomers predict the Earth will encounter this dust and pass through the cloud over the course of several days.

Earth will basically be caught in a double-whammy meteor shower with dust coming from two directions.

The dust will be very fine, with the largest particles expected to be only a few microns across. This means the dist will not spark a traditional meteor shower that can be easily seen from Earth. That much is a disappointment, however the dust is expected to fuel another phenomenon - noctilucent clouds.

Noctilucent clouds are clouds that form about 50 miles above the earth's surface, pretty much at the edge of space. At such a height, the ice crystals that form around the dust will reflect sunlight to the Earth long after the sun has set for observers on the ground.

So in the dark of night, skywatchers may enjoy electric blue clouds high above, a rare treat from Comet ISON.

Astronomers say such an event in unprecedented and while they have a good idea of what to expect, they can't be sure exactly what will happen. They do predict the grains of dust will eventually fall to the surface of the Earth, slowly filtering down out of the atmosphere over several years.

Astronomers have added that satellites and astronauts in space will not be in any danger from the microscopic particles.

Look for Comet ISON in mid-November. It should be exceptionally bright in late November through early December.