With that in mind, NASA this week issued a “Grand Challenge” to find all asteroids that could potentially threaten human existence and develop the means to deal with them. The challenge was issued at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters.

“NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth’s orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth,” said Lori Garver deputy administrator at NASA. “This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem.”

As part of the challenge, NASA is now soliciting ideas on how to accomplish the goal from private industry and other potential partners. The ultimate goal would be to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid. The agency is also asking for plans to deal with potential asteroid threats.

NASA’s Grand Challenges are what they call “ambitious” projects with a large scale that will need significant science and technology breakthroughs to accomplish. The Obama administration has also promoted NASA’s challenges as a part of its Strategy for American Innovation.

“I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort,” said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities.”

1998 QE2 poses no threat of hitting Earth during the flyby, space agency officials assure. Its closest approach will occur at 4:59 EDT on Friday (May 31) and it is expected to pass at least 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) away from the planet.

For those who would like to watch our impending doom the asteroid pass our planet on a live feed, Space.com will be providing the video. Hopefully, Harry Stamper and his crew will have planted the necessary nuclear devices by then. For those of you who don’t know what I’m referring to, this should help:

The impact completely wipes out most of New York, and leaves the majority of the east coast in flames. An initial dome-shaped shock wave propagates outward from the impact, flattening everything in its path. Debris from the impact is scattered into the upper atmosphere & beyond, some of it achieving a temporary earth orbit. Over time, some of that material forms rings around the earth which would gradually vanish as that material either falls back and burns up in the atmosphere as shooting stars, or travels further out into a space, leaving Earth.

Which sounds like a great time for all involved.

Later that week, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced that it was studying the event, which it predicted may happen every “several of tens to 100 years. The object was found to have been around 17 meters wide and was found to have exploded with a force of nearly 30 times that of the bomb that detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.

This week, NASA has announced that it is also analyzing the event. The agency has released a video detailing everything known about the meteor to date.

In addition to information already disclosed by the ESA, the NASA video reveals that astronomers have been able to devise the meteor’s orbit based on the trajectory of its fireball. The object is now thought to have come from the asteroid belt beyond Mars. Reports of the makeup of the meteor’s debris seem to confirm it was made of stone and a bit of iron, which is common for objects in the asteroid belt.

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that it is studying the event, which isn’t quite as rare as humans might hope. Astronomers predict an event of this sort may happen every “several of tens to 100 years.”

This particular meteorite was around 17 meters wide when it entered Earth’s atmosphere, traveling at around 18 kilometers per second (around 40,000 miles per hour). It exploded around 15 to 20 kilometers above the planets surface with the force of a 500 kiloton bomb. That’s around 30 times the energy released by the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima.

In a statement, Detlef Koschny, head of the Near-Earth Object activity division of the ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program, said that the meteorite was unrelated to the passing of 2012 DA14. This was determined due to the trajectory of the meteorite and the time of its impact in relation to the passing asteroid.

“The terminal part of the explosion probably likely occurred almost directly over Chelyabinsk. This was perhaps the single greatest contributor to the blast damage,” said Koschny. “As the explosion and fireball progressed along a shallow trajectory, the cylindrical blast wave would have propagated directly to the ground and would have been intense.”

Koschny stated that the airburst was the likely cause of most of the damage seen, and that window damage is expected starting at air pressures of 10 to 20 times normal air pressure.

(Image courtesy Eumetsat/ESA)

That’s because Google removed it.

And yes, it’s for the reason you suspect. Google took down the animated Doodle out of respect for those injured in Russia by that huge meteor shower. Reports indicate that over 500 people were injured as a result of the shower – most from broken glass and other parts of structures ripped apart by the meteorites. Google confirmed this to ABC News:

Out of respect for those injured in the extraordinary meteor shower in Russia earlier today, we have removed today’s doodle from the Google homepage. The doodle was created to mark Asteroid 2012 DA14 passing Earth.

So, here’s the Doodle you weren’t supposed to see. It will live on forever here.

[via SearchEngineLand]

A video of the event has quickly become one of the most-watched videos on YouTube today. It shows the object appear in the sky over the Russian city and break up in a flash of bright light.

While astronomers today were watching asteroid 2012 da14 as it made its close miss of the Earth, the object depicted in the video was too small for scientists to have predicted today’s event.

“Current information, which is not yet complete nor confirmed, points to a small asteroid,” said Detlef Koschny, head of Near-Earth Object activity at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) program. “There is no way it could have been predicted with the technical means available today. What can be said with near certainty is that this object has no connection with asteroid 2012 DA14.”

The SSA program, along with NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program (“Spaceguard”) are both searching the sky for objects that could pose a danger to Earth in the future. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx program will launch a probe in 2016 that will visit an asteroid that has a 1 in 2,400 chance of hitting the planet in the late 22nd century.

“Today’s event is a strong reminder of why we need continuous efforts to survey and identify near-Earth objects,” said Thomas Reiter, ESA’s director of Human Spaceflight and Operations. “Our SSA programme is developing a system of automated optical telescopes that can detect asteroids and other objects in solar orbits.”

(Image courtesy Eumetsat/ESA)

With the asteroid’s approach so near and the public’s growing awareness of the event, NASA has released another video to try and reassure people that doomsday is not on the way. It’s similar to the “Why the World Didn’t End Yesterday” video the agency released more than a week before the Maya Apocalypse doomsday scenarios predictably fell flat. Besides the obvious duty to assuage public fears, it’s clear NASA finds it valuable to have a record of using science to make predictions that actually come true.

The new video features James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, and Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the OSIRIS-REx mission, describing just how scientists know da14 isn’t a danger (hint: they use math) and what an exciting event today’s record-setting close flyby is for astronomers. The OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to launch a probe in 2016 that will visit an asteroid that actually might hit the Earth in the late 22nd century.

NASA will be streaming live commentary of the asteroid’s approach starting at 2 pm EST.

Though researchers have determined there is no danger posed by the object, the event will be a spectacle for astronomers around the world. Though the asteroid won’t be bright enough to see with the naked eye, those with a telescope or even a good pair of binoculars will be able to spot it.

For those who can’t observe the asteroid on their own, NASA announced this week that it will be live-streaming coverage of the object’s approach. The broadcast will provide commentary from scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and real-time animation to demonstrate exactly where the asteroid is. A Live view of the asteroid itself will also be featured, assuming the weather over observatories isn’t cloudy.

The half-hour live-stream will begin tomorrow at 2 pm EST, and can be seen on NASA TV or on the JPL Ustream page. The JPL Ustream will also begin showing footage of the asteroid from Australian and European observatories starting at 12 pm EST. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will stream footage of the asteroid from one of its telescopes starting at 9 pm EST, and researchers there will be taking questions via Twitter.

(Image courtesy LCOGT/Faulkes)

This week Deep Space Industries (DSI), a company that wants to develop the technology to mine asteroids, made the somewhat melancholic estimate that DA14 could contain metals and propellant worth as much as $195 billion. Since the asteroid will fly by the Earth traveling at 17,400 miles per hour, however, it isn’t practical to mine.

“While this week’s visitor isn’t going the right way for us to harvest it, there will be others that are, and we want to be ready when they arrive,” said Rick Tumlinson, Chairman of DSI. “Even with conservative estimates of the potential value of any given asteroid, if we begin to utilize them in space they are all the equivalent of a space oasis for refueling and resupply.”

NASA has estimated that DA14 is only about 150 feet across, but DSI believes that is still big enough to be worth billions. DSI “experts” estimate that if 10% of the asteroid were made of minable metals, they could be worth $130 billion. If another 5% of the asteroid could be mined for water, it could be used as $65 billion worth of rocket fuel in space.

DSI is hoping to begin space mining around the year 2020. In the meantime, the company will be sending “FireFly” probes to examine asteroids, and later “DragonFly” probes that will take samples of the asteroid.

NASA will also be sending probes to investigate asteroids before 2020. In 2016, the agency will launch the OSIRIS-REx probe, which will visit the Earth-threatening asteroid 1999 RQ36.

To prepare for (and hopefully prevent) such a disaster, NASA has formed the Near-Earth Object (NEO) observations program, which finds and tracks potential celestial threats. The program estimates that there are over 1,300 “Potentially Hazardous Asteroids” (PHA) with a small chance of hitting the Earth someday.

Today, NASA outlined its next step in better understanding those objects to help researchers more accurately predict the probability of future impacts. In 2016 the agency will launch OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith Explorer), a spacecraft designed to visit a PHA and measure its properties.

The spacecraft will arrive in orbit around an asteroid named 1999 RQ36 in the year 2018. The object is 457 meters across and is also one of most threatening PHAs yet found.

“For such a large object, it has one of the highest known probabilities of impacting Earth, a 1 in 2,400 chance late in the 22nd century, according to calculations by Steve Chesley, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory,” said Edward Beshore, deputy principal investigator for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission and a researcher at the University of Arizona.

The most important measurement the probe will make is of the Yarkovsky effect, which occurs as a result of asteroids heating and cooling.

“When an asteroid makes a close pass to Earth, the gravitational pull from our planet changes the asteroid’s orbit,” said Beshore. “However, how this change will affect the evolution of the asteroid’s orbit is difficult for us to predict because there are also other small forces continuously acting on the asteroid to change its orbit. The most significant of these smaller forces is the Yarkovsky effect – a minute push on an asteroid that happens when it is warmed up by the sun and then later re-radiates this heat in a different direction as infrared radiation.”

The magnitude of the effect is difficult to determine from Earth, since asteroids have different sizes, shapes, and compositions. Beshore and his colleagues expect OSIRIS-REx to provide an estimate of the Yarkovsky force on RQ36 twice as precise as current ones. The measurements should help researchers better estimate the effect on other asteroids.

If new estimates find RQ36 to be an imminent danger to Earth, researchers will have to come up with a way to alter the object’s orbit.

“There are several mitigation strategies,” said Beshore. “We could explode a small nuclear device close above the surface on one side of the asteroid. This could be very effective – it would vaporize the surface layer, which would then fly off at very high speed, causing a rocket thrust that would shove everything over by a few centimeters per second. This might be plenty to deflect the asteroid. Other strategies include kinetic impactors, where you strike an asteroid very hard with a heavy projectile moving at high speed. In 2005, NASA’s Deep Impact mission hit comet Tempel 1 with a 370-kilogram (over 815-pound) copper slug at about five kilometers per second (over 11,000 miles per hour), not nearly enough to significantly alter the orbit of the five-kilometer-sized body, but a proof of the technology for this kind of mission. Another idea is to use a gravity tractor – station a spacecraft precisely enough near the asteroid which would gradually deflect it with only its gravitational pull.”

(Image courtesy NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)