TechKey Talk – graVITas 25’ – Premium Events: Innovation at the Core

It's the 365 days of Astronomy PodGa, coming in 3, 2, 1. In 2016, NASA created the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to manage the mission of finding, tracking, and studying asteroids and comets which could pose an impact threat to our home planet. Currently, a few thousand scientists, engineers, space agency personnel, and even some amazing amateurs collaborate in organizations like the International Asteroid Warning Network to provide planetary defense. My team, the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, and the NASA-funded Panstars Group in Hawaii, have and continue to discover more than 90% of the potentially dangerous objects which enter our neighborhood. Once discovered, it is important to track them precisely to determine their paths. NASA is planning to launch the NEO surveyor, which will work together with ground-based observers to search for, detect, and track potentially dangerous objects. Additional efforts are going into characterizing objects so that effective mitigation strategies can be developed for the eventuality that there is a large object with our number on it. NASA's dark mission demonstrated the feasibility of changing the orbit of an asteroid by slamming a spacecraft into dimorphous, the small moon of the larger asteroid, Didymos. So far, asteroid hunters have tracked 10 small harmless space rocks into our atmosphere. NASA is preparing serious plans to provide early warning and civil defense measures for city-destroying space rocks that are likely to be headed our way in the future. The NASA documentary, Planetary Defenders, provides an excellent overview and can be streamed on the internet. For travelers in the night, this is Dr. Al Grower. Stay tuned. My Catalyne-A-Sky survey teammate Vivian Carvuhal was asteroid hunting in the constellation of Cephas, with our small but mighty Schmidt telescope on Mount Bigelow, Arizona, when she spotted a fast moving point of light in a set of her images. After Vivian posted her discovery on the Minor Planet Center's near-Earth Object Confirmation page, her new object was tracked by telescopes at 17 different observatories around the world. Scientists used these data to calculate its orbit about the Sun, estimate its mass, and give it the name 2025JB1. When Vivian first spotted this large container-ship-sized asteroid, it was about 126 times the moon's distance from us. According to the Earth Impact Effects calculator from the Imperial College of London and Purdue University, once every 140,000 years or so, an asteroid the size of 2025JB1 enters the Earth's atmosphere, begins to break up at an altitude of 238,000 feet, and could create a crater, 1900 feet deep, and 5.5 miles in diameter in crystalline rock. 50 miles from impact you would experience seismic activity similar to a Richter scale 7.2 magnitude earthquake. At this distance, 50 miles from impact thermal radiation would give a person third-degree burns, deciduous trees would ignite, and you would be sprinkled with dust and rocks having a medium diameter of four inches. Fortunately, on its current path, there is zero probability that 2025JB1 will impact our home planet in the foreseeable future. Further, asteroid hunters continue to search for any other large asteroids which might impact Earth, so that mitigation efforts would be effective. Al Grower. Stay tuned. You are listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Cool. The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. Audio post-production is by me, Richard Drum. Project management is by Aviva Yamani, and hosting is donated by Libsyn.com. This content is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License. Please share what you love, but don't sell what's free. This show is made possible thanks to the generous donations of people like you. Please consider supporting our show on patreon.com/cosmoquestx and get access to bonus content. Without your passion and contribution, we won't be able to share the stories and inspire the worlds. We invite you to join our community of storytellers and share your voice with the listeners worldwide. As we wrap up today's episode, we're looking forward to unraveling more stories from the universe. With every new discovery from ground-based and space-based observatories, and each milestone and space exploration, we come closer to understanding the cosmos and our place within it. Until next time, let the stars guide your curiosity. [Music]