{"id":17999,"date":"2019-06-27T22:11:46","date_gmt":"2019-06-27T14:11:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/scientists-turn-up-the-spotlight-on-space-perils-and-prospects-for-asteroid-day\/"},"modified":"2019-06-27T22:11:46","modified_gmt":"2019-06-27T14:11:46","slug":"scientists-turn-up-the-spotlight-on-space-perils-and-prospects-for-asteroid-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/scientists-turn-up-the-spotlight-on-space-perils-and-prospects-for-asteroid-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists turn up the spotlight on space perils (and prospects) for Asteroid Day"},"content":{"rendered":"
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An artist\u2019s conception shows NASA\u2019s DART spacecraft approaching a binary asteroid. (NASA \/ JHUAPL Illustration)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Asteroid Day marks a catastrophic cosmic blast that flattened Siberian forests on June 30, 1908 \u2014 but the theme for this year\u2019s observance is hope rather than dread.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a really exciting time for planetary defense,\u201d former NASA astronaut Ed Lu, executive director of the B612 Foundation\u2019s Asteroid Institute, told reporters today during the buildup to Sunday\u2019s anniversary. And the University of Washington\u2019s DIRAC Institute has a starring role.<\/p>\n

DIRAC stands for \u201cData Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology,\u201d which sums up the UW institute\u2019s mission to make sense out of the streams of data that are expected to come from current and future asteroid-monitoring efforts.<\/p>\n

It just takes one big asteroid or comet to make for a bad day. The dinosaurs found that out 66 million years ago when a miles-wide space rock hit Earth, sparking a mass extinction. A roughly 200-foot-wide comet or asteroid was behind the 1908 blast, now known as the Tunguska event. More recently, the breakup of a 60-foot-wide asteroid over the Siberian city of Chelyabinsk put the world on edge in 2013.<\/p>\n

Americans rate asteroid and comet monitoring as the top priority for the U.S. space program, higher than exploration of the moon or Mars, according to survey results released last week by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re likely to be hearing even more about asteroids in the next few years, thanks to projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile. The LSST, which is due to begin science operations in the early 2020s, is expected to discover more than 100,000 near-Earth objects \u2014 including some that might look as if they have a chance of hitting Earth someday.<\/p>\n

Scientists at the DIRAC Institute, including two researchers affiliated with the Asteroid Institute, are already hard at work developing the data analysis system that will be used to determine the orbits of the near-Earth objects discovered by the LSST. \u201cThat is a very large computational problem,\u201d Lu said.<\/p>\n

Orbit determination on a massive scale will be crucial once the LSST swings into action. \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to just say, \u2018I\u2019ve discovered or seen it.\u2019 That doesn\u2019t do any good,\u201d Lu said. \u201cYou need to know where that asteroid is going.\u201d<\/p>\n