Tag: Asteroids

Categories
GeekWire

Deep Space plans to land on asteroid by 2020

Image: Prospector-1
An artist’s conception shows the Prospector 1 probe investigating an asteroid. (Credit DSI)

One of the two big players in the asteroid mining market, Deep Space Industries, today unveiled its plan to land a 110-pound spacecraft on a near-Earth asteroid by 2020.

The spacecraft, known as Prospector-1, would study the yet-to-be-selected asteroid to determine the value of its resources for mining. It’ll also put Deep Space Industries’ water-based propulsion system to an interplanetary test.

“Deep Space Industries has worked diligently to get to this point, and now we can say with confidence that we have the right technology, the right team and the right plan to execute this historic mission,” Rick Tumlinson, DSI’s board chairman and co-founder, said in a news release.

California-based DSI and its partners in Luxembourg say they’ll launch a precursor satellite called Prospector-X into low Earth orbit next year to test the technologies that would be used for Prospector-1.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Mass extinction traced to a ‘one-two punch’

Image: Dying dinosaur
What led to the mass extinction that did in the dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago? Scientists say volcano-caused climate change was a contributing cause. (Credit: Zina Deretsky / NSF)

Scientists generally agree that a catastrophic asteroid blast killed off the dinosaurs and most of Earth’s other species more than 65 million years ago, but newly described evidence supports the view that there was an additional culprit: rapid climate change brought on by volcanic eruptions.

The idea that the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction was a one-two punch isn’t new. For decades, scientists have debated how much the eruptions in the Indian subcontinent’s Deccan Traps contributed to the die-off, as opposed to the miles-wide space rock that hit the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

A study of ancient Antarctic fossil seashells, published online today in Nature Communications, turns the spotlight on the volcanoes’ effect.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Asteroid Day hits home with videos

Image: Asteroid entering atmosphere
An artist’s conception shows an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere. (Credit: NASA)

One bad day is all it takes for an asteroid to set off a mass extinction. But Asteroid Day – which falls on June 30 – is set aside as one good day to focus on the effort to head off future bad days, and even take advantage of the riches that near-Earth objects can offer.

“Our goal with Asteroid Day is to dedicate one day each year to learn about asteroids, the origins of our universe, and to support the resources necessary to see, track and deflect dangerous asteroids from Earth’s orbital path,” Brian May, the guitarist/astrophysicist who co-founded the Asteroid Day campaign, said in a news release marking the occasion.

Hundreds of museums and science centers around the globe, including Seattle’s Museum of Flight, are joining in the campaign. The museum will be live-streaming Asteroid Day video presentations and offering family activities to raise awareness about asteroids on Thursday.

This year, Asteroid Day’s organizers also have rolled out a seven-part YouTube video series that explains the threat – and the solutions that are within our reach.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Stage set for private missions to moon, Mars

Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows Moon Express’ MX-1 lander extending its robotic arm to take a “selfie” of the spacecraft on the lunar surface with Earth in the background. (Credit: Moon Express)

After months of discussion, federal agencies are closing in on a process to approve commercial missions to other celestial bodies – including the moon, Mars and asteroids.

The groundwork for the process was laid in April, when the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told Congress that the Transportation Department was the most appropriate entity to approve new kinds of commercial space missions such as on-orbit satellite servicing and trips beyond Earth orbit.

Now the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies are “working through the interagency process to ensure a mechanism is in place that permits emerging commercial space operations,” FAA spokesman Hank Price said in a statement emailed to GeekWire.

The issue was brought to a head when Moon Express, one of the companies chasing the Google Lunar X Prize, asked the FAA to review its plans to put a lander on the moon next year. The FAA is part of the Transportation Department. Its Office of Commercial Space Transportation is currently in charge of approving commercial space launches and re-entries, but not activities in orbit or in deep space.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

‘Space selfie’ project canceled; refunds offered

Image: Space selfie
An artist’s conception shows how an Arkyd 100 space telescope would have taken a “space selfie” from orbit. (Credit: Planetary Resources via Kickstarter)

REDMOND, Wash. – Three years ago, Planetary Resources raised more than $1.5 million on Kickstarter to build a space telescope that would let users snap selfies from orbit. Today, the company says it can’t follow through on the project – and is offering full refunds to its 17,614 backers.

“It’s a decision that we make with a heavy heart,” Chris Lewicki, president and CEO of Planetary Resources, told GeekWire during a visit to the company’s Redmond headquarters.

Lewicki said the support received during the Kickstarter campaign exceeded their wildest expectations, but it wasn’t enough to fund everything that needed to be done to turn the promised system into reality.

“We evaluated a lot of different opportunities with businesses, with educational institutions, with different outlets,” he said. “What we didn’t find, since the campaign closed a few years ago, was the follow-on interest to take it from a project and scale it into a fully funded mission. … We’re going to wind down the project and bring it to a close.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Planetary Resources focuses on Earth imaging

Image: Planetary Resources clean room
Planetary Resources’ Chris Lewicki and GeekWire’s Alan Boyle mug for the camera behind two Arkyd 6 satellites being tested for flight in Planetary Resources’ clean room. (GeekWire photo by Kevin Lisota)

REDMOND, Wash. – Planetary Resources was founded as an asteroid mining company, but a fresh infusion of $21.1 million in investment puts the emphasis on a space frontier that’s closer to home: Earth observation.

“It leverages everything that we have been working on for the last several years … and it moves us forward in the direction of asteroid prospecting,” Planetary Resources’ president and CEO, Chris Lewicki, said this week during a tour of the company’s Redmond headquarters.

The Series A funding announced today will be used to deploy and operate Planetary Resources’ Earth observation program,known as Ceres. The lead investor is the OS Fund, founded by Los Angeles venture capitalist Bryan Johnson. Other investors include Idea Bulb Ventures, Vast Ventures, Grishin Robotics, Conversion Capital, the Seraph Group, Space Angels Network and Google co-founder Larry Page.

In a statement, Johnson said Ceres will represent “a seismic shift for the new space economy.”

Planetary Resources also announced it would be shutting down what was once a wildly popular Kickstarter project that would have enabled backers to take “space selfie” pictures with the company’s space telescopes. Lewicki said all 17,614 backers would be offered full refunds.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

NASA fires back in spat over asteroid data

Image: WISE spacecraft
An artist’s conception shows NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. WISE observations of near-Earth objects were analyzed for the NEOWISE mission. (Credit: NASA)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – NASA issued a statement today disputing Seattle tech icon Nathan Myhrvold’s critique of asteroid data analysis from the space agency’s NEOWISE mission.

The statement follows up on reports published this week by GeekWire and othermedia outlets. In those reports, Myhrvold said NEOWISE’s analysis relied on flawed statistical calculations, which resulted in incorrect or highly uncertain measurements for thousands of asteroids.

When GeekWire showed Myhrvold’s critique to scientists associated with NEOWISE and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, they identified what they said were serious errors – including misinterpretations of NEOWISE’s methods and an apparent confusion between radius and diameter in one key equation. GeekWire’s report on Monday referred to those problems, as well as Myhrvold’s acknowledgment of mistakes.

Today’s NASA statement refers to those errors as “mistakes that an independent peer review process is designed to catch.”

“While critique and re-examination of published results are essential to the scientific process, it is important that any paper undergo peer review by an independent journal before it can be seriously considered,” NASA said. “This completes a necessary step to ensure science results are independently validated, reproducible and of value to the science community.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Nathan Myhrvold stirs up an asteroid argument

Image: Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Myhrvold shows off a fragment of the Chelyabinsk meteorite in his office at Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Millionaire techie Nathan Myhrvold is used to stirring up controversy over issues ranging from patent licensing to dinosaur growth rates, but now he’s weighing in on an even bigger debate: the search for potentially hazardous asteroids.

In a 110-page research paper posted to the ArXiv pre-print server and submitted to the journal Icarus for peer-reviewed publication, Myhrvold says the most comprehensive survey of near-Earth asteroids ever done, known as NEOWISE, suffers from serious statistical flaws.

“They made a set of numbers that look right, They have what Stephen Colbert calls ‘truthiness.’ But that doesn’t mean they are right,” he told GeekWire today during an interview at the Bellevue headquarters of Intellectual Ventures, the company he founded.

On the other side of the debate, NEOWISE’s principal investigator, Amy Mainzer of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says it’s Myhrvold’s numbers that don’t look right.

“The paper contains multiple mistakes, including the confusion between diameter and radius (which is by itself enough to render the results wrong),” she wrote in an email to GeekWire. “Nonsensical asteroid diameters are presented throughout by the author.”

Mainzer noted that Myhrvold’s paper has not yet gone through formal peer review.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How the ion drive will blaze a trail to asteroid

Image: Electric propulsion probe
An artist’s concept shows a space probe powered by ion thrusters. (Credit: Aerojet Rocketdyne)

Aerojet Rocketdyne’s next-generation ion thrusters could well make their debut in space during NASA’s robotic mission to grab a piece of an asteroid and bring it back to lunar orbit in the 2020s.

Earlier this week, NASA announced that Aerojet’s operation in Redmond, Wash., would be getting in on a 36-month, $67 milllion contract to develop a high-power electric propulsion system for future spacecraft. Today, NASA officials explained what the system would be used for.

“Basically, we’re building a whole new drive train for deep-space exploration,” Bryan Smith, director of NASA’s Space Flight Systems Directorate at Glenn Research Center in Ohio, told reporters.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

‘Death by meteorite’ causes a stir in India

Image: Asteroid entering atmosphere
An artist’s conception shows an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere. (Credit: NASA)

Death by meteorite is a common theme in science-fiction movies, but in real life, the chances of being done in by a falling space rock are virtually nil. That’s what makes the reports about the death of Indian bus driver V. Kamaraj in an apparent meteorite strike so remarkable.

Some would argue that the case is unprecedented in modern history – but as usual, that depends on how precisely you define the precedents.

First, the reports: NDTV quotes officials as saying that a blast at Bharathidasan Engineering College, in Natrampalli in India’s Tamil Nadu state, killed Kamaraj and injured three others on Saturday at Bharathidasan Engineering College. A 2-foot-deep crater was left in the ground, and the shock wave shattered windshields and window panes around the site.

At first, the explosion was blamed a “drone-like” flying object or a bomb. But on Sunday, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa was quoted as saying that a meteorite caused the blast. About $1,475 (100,000 rupees) in relief was paid out to Kamaraj’s family, and $370 was paid to each of the injured, NDTV quoted the minister as saying.

Authorities said they recovered what appears to be a piece of the meteorite, but found no trace of explosives. Scientists still have to verify that the debris actually came from space.

Get the full story on GeekWire.