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Showing posts from November, 2021

NASA’s first planetary defense mission will nudge an asteroid

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-first-planetary-defense-mission-will-nudge-asteroid By Adam Mann, Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Intentional crash of robotic probe will test way to avert asteroid impacts on Earth. In the name of planetary defense, NASA is set to launch a robotic probe next week that in late 2022 will hurtle into a sizable space rock in the hopes of nudging its orbit. Although the celestial target of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) poses no danger to our planet, the mission will assess the feasibility of deflecting potentially hazardous objects away from Earth.… [ DART successfully launched last night (Tuesday, Nov. 23, at 10:21 p.m. PST)] See also New York Times article .

It Follows Earth Around the Sun. Just Don’t Call It a Moon

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/11/science/moon-kamooalewa-asteroid.html By Robin George Andrews , The New York Times.  Excerpt: ...a little rock would decide to tag along with Earth and the moon on their yearly circumnavigation of the sun. Said rock, 165 feet long, was discovered in 2016 by Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid-hunting telescope. This eccentric entity’s Hawaiian name, (469219)  Kamoʻoalewa , means “wobbling celestial object.” As it repeatedly loops around Earth, this shy body never gets closer than 9 million miles, which is 38 times farther out than the moon. It gets as distant as 25 million miles away before swinging back around for a closer encounter. Calculations of its orbital waltz indicate that it began trailing our planet in a relatively stable manner  about a century ago , and it will continue to pirouette around Earth for several centuries to come. ...in a paper published Thursday in  Communications Earth & Environment , a team of scientists reported ... that it

Star System With Right-Angled Planets Surprises Astronomers

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/science/perpendicular-planets-star-system.html By Jonathan O’Callaghan , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Two planets orbit the poles while another revolves around the star’s equator, suggesting a mysterious, undetected force.… See also A Mysterious, Undetected Force Is Influencing the Orbit of Two Alien Worlds and the paper -- The Rossiter–McLaughlin effect revolutions: an ultra-short period planet and a warm mini-Neptune on perpendicular orbits .