Space News and Facts Newsletter #47
April 3, 2022 - April 9, 2022
Watch out for the bolides!
NASA has a "Planetary Defense Coordination Office" (PDCO). It is tasked with tracking Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) that could pose a threat to Earth. The PDCO was just established back in 2016! (FYI: there was a previous program consolidated under the new PDCO.)
NASA's PDCO coordinates with the "International Asteroid Warning Network" (IAWN). That body was established in 2013 via United Nations recommendations.
NEOs are defined as something that "could pass" Earth within 30 million miles (48.28 million kilometers). But NASA begins to pay closer attention when an object "could pass" within 5 million miles (8.04 million kilometers). That "could pass" qualification is important. Objects are tracked further out, but when it can be determined that their trajectory is headed this way, NASA takes interest.
Our solar system has too many asteroids and comets to fully catalogue, so it's the close ones that could cause a problem for planetary defense.
BTW, both asteroids and comets obit our Sun. Asteroids are primarily small, rocky objects. Comets are primarily ice and dust - which explains their "tails" of vaporized material. Meteors are small, broken-off pieces from either asteroids or comets that actually enter our atmosphere. (FYI: technically, a "meteor" is a "meteoroid" that enters the atmosphere causing a streak of light in the sky.) And "bolides" are unusually bright meteors.
I posted about NASA's "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (aka "ATLAS") on February 4, 2022. That falls under the PDCO. And, of course, NASA launched their "DART" (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission to test asteroid deflection on November 24, 2022. The DART spacecraft will deliberately impact the "moonlet" of the near-Earth asteroid Didymos.
The April 7, 2022 JPL linked press release below talks about NASA's PDCO and the U.S. Space Force releasing data on bolides. This information will be used by researchers to "enhance the planetary defense community’s current ability to model the effects of impacts by larger asteroids that could one day pose a threat to Earth."
US Space Force Releases Decades of Bolide Data to NASA for Planetary Defense Studies
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) released the latest update to their WorldWide Telescope (WWT) on February 15, 2022. The WWT is an application that accesses gigabytes of astronomical images from observatories and surveys around the world. The data sets it has access to are huge!