NASA Taps Webb To Help Study 2032 Asteroid Threat

In all likelihood, asteroid 2024 YR4 will slip silently past the Earth. Based on the data we have so far, there’s an estimated chance of only 2.1% to 2.3% that it will collide with the planet on December 22nd, 2032. Under normal circumstances, if somebody told you there was a roughly 98% chance of something not happening, you probably wouldn’t give it a second thought. There’s certainly a case to be made that you should feel that way in regards to this particular event — frankly, it’s a lot more likely that some other terrible thing is going to happen to you in the next eight years than it is an asteroid is going to ruin your Christmas party.

That being said, when you consider the scale of the cosmos, a 2+% chance of getting hit is enough to raise some eyebrows. After all, it’s the highest likelihood of an asteroid impact that we’re currently aware of. It’s also troubling that the number has only gone up as further observations of 2024 YR4’s orbit have been made; a few weeks ago, the impact probability was just 1%. Accordingly, NASA has recently announced they’ll be making time in the James Webb Space Telescope’s busy scientific schedule to observe the asteroid next month.

So keeping in mind that we’re still talking about an event that’s statistically unlikely to actually occur, let’s take a look at what we know about 2024 YR4, and how further study and analysis can give us a better idea of what kind of threat we’re dealing with.

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Hackaday Links: February 2, 2025

All things considered, it was a very bad week for aviation here in the United States. Three separate crashes, two of which involved US military aircraft, have left over 70 people dead. We’ll spare you the details since there are plenty of other places to get news like that, but we did want to touch on one bright spot in this week’s aviation news: the first successful supersonic flight by a US-made civilian aircraft. There are a lot of caveats to that claim, but it’s clear that Boom Supersonic is on a path to commercializing supersonic air transportation for the first time since the Concorde was retired. Their XB-1 “Baby Boom” test aircraft managed three separate supersonic runs during the January 28 test flight over the Mojave test range. As usual, Scott Manley has excellent coverage of the test flight, including a look at how Boom used a Starlink terminal and an iPhone to stream cockpit video.

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Life Found On Ryugu Asteroid Sample, But It Looks Very Familiar

Samples taken from the space-returned piece of asteroid Ryugu were collected and prepared under strict anti-contamination controls. Inside the cleanest of clean rooms, a tiny particle was collected from the returned sample with sterilized tools in a nitrogen atmosphere and stored in airtight containers before being embedded in an epoxy block for scanning electron microscopy.

It’s hard to imagine what more one could do, but despite all the precautions taken, the samples were rapidly colonized by terrestrial microorganisms. Only the upper few microns of the sample surface, but it happened. That’s what the images above show.

The surface of Ryugu from Rover 1B’s camera. Source: JAXA

Obtaining a sample from asteroid Ryugu was a triumph. Could this organic matter have come from the asteroid itself? In a word, no. Researchers have concluded the microorganisms are almost certainly terrestrial bacteria that contaminated the sample during collection, despite the precautions taken.

You can read the study to get all the details, but it seems that microorganisms — our world’s greatest colonizers — can circumvent contamination controls. No surprise, in a way. Every corner of our world is absolutely awash in microbial life. Opening samples on Earth comes with challenges.

As for off-Earth, robots may be doing the exploration but despite NASA assembling landers in clean room environments we may have already inadvertently exported terrestrial microbes to the Moon, and Mars. The search for life to which we are not related is one of science and humanity’s greatest quests, but it seems life found on a space-returned samples will end up looking awfully familiar until we step up our game.

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Hackaday Links: October 13, 2024

So far, food for astronauts hasn’t exactly been haute cuisine. Freeze-dried cereal cubes, squeezable tubes filled with what amounts to baby food, and meals reconstituted with water from a fuel cell don’t seem like meals to write home about. And from the sound of research into turning asteroids into astronaut food, things aren’t going to get better with space food anytime soon. The work comes from Western University in Canada and proposes that carbonaceous asteroids like the recently explored Bennu be converted into edible biomass by bacteria. The exact bugs go unmentioned, but when fed simulated asteroid bits are said to produce a material similar in texture and appearance to a “caramel milkshake.” Having grown hundreds of liters of bacterial cultures in the lab, we agree that liquid cultures spun down in a centrifuge look tasty, but if the smell is any indication, the taste probably won’t live up to expectations. Still, when a 500-meter-wide chunk of asteroid can produce enough nutritionally complete food to sustain between 600 and 17,000 astronauts for a year without having to ship it up the gravity well, concessions will likely be made. We expect that this won’t apply to the nascent space tourism industry, which for the foreseeable future will probably build its customer base on deep-pocketed thrill-seekers, a group that’s not known for its ability to compromise on creature comforts.

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The Solar System Is Weirder Than You Think

When I was a kid, the solar system was simple. There were nine planets and they all orbited in more-or-less circles around the sun. This same sun-and-a-handful-of-planets scheme repeated itself again and again throughout our galaxy, and these galaxies make up the universe. It’s a great story that’s easy to wrap your mind around, and of course it’s a great first approximation, except maybe that “nine planets” thing, which was just a fluke that we’ll examine shortly.

What’s happened since, however, is that telescopes have gotten significantly better, and many more bodies of all sorts have been discovered in the solar system which is awesome. But as a casual astronomy observer, I’ve given up hope of holding on to a simple mental model. The solar system is just too weird.

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Hackaday Links: January 14, 2024

How long does it take a team of rocket scientists to remove two screws? When the screws they’re working on are keeping a priceless sample of asteroid safe, it’s about three months. That’s how long NASA has been working on the OSIRIS-REx sample return canister, which came back to Earth from asteroid Bennu back in September. The container was crammed full of asteroid bits, thanks in part to an overly energetic impact between the sample-collecting boom and Bennu. There was so much stuff that planetary scientists were able to recover about 70 grams of material that was covering the outside of the sealed container; this must have been a boon to the engineers, who got to figure out how to open the jammed cover of the container without anyone breathing down their necks for samples to study. The problem was a pair of stuck fasteners out of the 35 holding the lid on the container; the solution was far more complicated than a spritz of WD-40 and a little bit of heating with an oxy-acetylene torch. Engineers had to design two “clamp-like tools” and test them on a mock-up to make sure they wouldn’t contaminate the sample. We’d love to know more about these tools; trust us, we’ll be looking into this closely. If we find anything, a full article will be forthcoming.

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NASA Blames Probe Chute Failure On Wire Labels

When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule screamed its way through the upper atmosphere, it marked the first time the space agency had brought material from an asteroid back to Earth. Hundreds of thousands tuned into the September 24th live stream so they could watch the capsule land at the Utah Test and Training Range. But about ten minutes before the capsule was set to touchdown, keen eyed viewers may have noticed something a bit odd — when ground control called out that the vehicle’s drogue parachute was commanded to deploy…nothing seemed to happen.

Now NASA knows why it didn’t work as expected, and it ended up being the sort of Earthly problem that we’d wager a few in this audience have run into themselves from time to time.

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