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The rise and fall of the riskiest asteroid in a decade
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By NASA
Illustration of the main asteroid belt, orbiting the Sun between Mars and JupiterNASA NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope includes asteroids on its list of objects studied and secrets revealed.
A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge repurposed Webb’s observations of a distant star to reveal a population of small asteroids — smaller than astronomers had ever detected orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The 138 new asteroids range from the size of a bus to the size of a stadium — a size range in the main belt that has not been observable with ground-based telescopes. Knowing how many main belt asteroids are in different size ranges can tell us something about how asteroids have been changed over time by collisions. That process is related to how some of them have escaped the main belt over the solar system’s history, and even how meteorites end up on Earth.
“We now understand more about how small objects in the asteroid belt are formed and how many there could be,” said Tom Greene, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley and co-author on the paper presenting the results. “Asteroids this size likely formed from collisions between larger ones in the main belt and are likely to drift towards the vicinity of Earth and the Sun.”
Insights from this research could inform the work of the Asteroid Threat Assessment Project at Ames. ATAP works across disciplines to support NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office by studying what would happen in the case of an Earth impact and modeling the associated risks.
“It’s exciting that Webb’s capabilities can be used to glean insights into asteroids,” said Jessie Dotson, an astrophysicist at Ames and member of ATAP. “Understanding the sizes, numbers, and evolutionary history of smaller main belt asteroids provides important background about the near-Earth asteroids we study for planetary defense.”
Illustration of the James Webb Space TelescopeNASA The team that made the asteroid detections, led by research scientist Artem Burdanov and professor of planetary science Julien de Wit, both of MIT, developed a method to analyze existing Webb images for the presence of asteroids that may have been inadvertently “caught on film” as they passed in front of the telescope. Using the new image processing technique, they studied more than 10,000 images of the star TRAPPIST-1, originally taken to search for atmospheres around planets orbiting the star, in the search for life beyond Earth.
Asteroids shine more brightly in infrared light, the wavelength Webb is tuned to detect, than in visible light, helping reveal the population of main belt asteroids that had gone unnoticed until now. NASA will also take advantage of that infrared glow with an upcoming mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor. NEO Surveyor is the first space telescope specifically designed to hunt for near-Earth asteroids and comets that may be potential hazards to Earth.
The paper presenting this research, “Detections of decameter main-belt asteroids with JWST,” was published Dec. 9 in Nature.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.
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By NASA
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft captured this image of Vesta as it left the giant asteroid’s orbit in 2012. The framing camera was looking down at the north pole, which is in the middle of the image.NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Known as flow formations, these channels could be etched on bodies that would seem inhospitable to liquid because they are exposed to the extreme vacuum conditions of space.
Pocked with craters, the surfaces of many celestial bodies in our solar system provide clear evidence of a 4.6-billion-year battering by meteoroids and other space debris. But on some worlds, including the giant asteroid Vesta that NASA’s Dawn mission explored, the surfaces also contain deep channels, or gullies, whose origins are not fully understood.
A prime hypothesis holds that they formed from dry debris flows driven by geophysical processes, such as meteoroid impacts, and changes in temperature due to Sun exposure. A recent NASA-funded study, however, provides some evidence that impacts on Vesta may have triggered a less-obvious geologic process: sudden and brief flows of water that carved gullies and deposited fans of sediment. By using lab equipment to mimic conditions on Vesta, the study, which appeared in Planetary Science Journal, detailed for the first time what the liquid could be made of and how long it would flow before freezing.
Although the existence of frozen brine deposits on Vesta is unconfirmed, scientists have previously hypothesized that meteoroid impacts could have exposed and melted ice that lay under the surface of worlds like Vesta. In that scenario, flows resulting from this process could have etched gullies and other surface features that resemble those on Earth.
To explore potential explanations for deep channels, or gullies, seen on Vesta, scientists used JPL’s Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE, to simulate conditions on the giant asteroid that would occur after meteoroids strike the surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech But how could airless worlds — celestial bodies without atmospheres and exposed to the intense vacuum of space — host liquids on the surface long enough for them to flow? Such a process would run contrary to the understanding that liquids quickly destabilize in a vacuum, changing to a gas when the pressure drops.
“Not only do impacts trigger a flow of liquid on the surface, the liquids are active long enough to create specific surface features,” said project leader and planetary scientist Jennifer Scully of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the experiments were conducted. “But for how long? Most liquids become unstable quickly on these airless bodies, where the vacuum of space is unyielding.”
The critical component turns out to be sodium chloride — table salt. The experiments found that in conditions like those on Vesta, pure water froze almost instantly, while briny liquids stayed fluid for at least an hour. “That’s long enough to form the flow-associated features identified on Vesta, which were estimated to require up to a half-hour,” said lead author Michael J. Poston of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
Launched in 2007, the Dawn spacecraft traveled to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to orbit Vesta for 14 months and Ceres for almost four years. Before ending in 2018, the mission uncovered evidence that Ceres had been home to a subsurface reservoir of brine and may still be transferring brines from its interior to the surface. The recent research offers insights into processes on Ceres but focuses on Vesta, where ice and salts may produce briny liquid when heated by an impact, scientists said.
Re-creating Vesta
To re-create Vesta-like conditions that would occur after a meteoroid impact, the scientists relied on a test chamber at JPL called the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE. By rapidly reducing the air pressure surrounding samples of liquid, they mimicked the environment around fluid that comes to the surface. Exposed to vacuum conditions, pure water froze instantly. But salty fluids hung around longer, continuing to flow before freezing.
The brines they experimented with were a little over an inch (a few centimeters) deep; scientists concluded the flows on Vesta that are yards to tens of yards deep would take even longer to refreeze.
The researchers were also able to re-create the “lids” of frozen material thought to form on brines. Essentially a frozen top layer, the lids stabilize the liquid beneath them, protecting it from being exposed to the vacuum of space — or, in this case the vacuum of the DUSTIE chamber — and helping the liquid flow longer before freezing again.
This phenomenon is similar to how on Earth lava flows farther in lava tubes than when exposed to cool surface temperatures. It also matches up with modeling research conducted around potential mud volcanoes on Mars and volcanoes that may have spewed icy material from volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
“Our results contribute to a growing body of work that uses lab experiments to understand how long liquids last on a variety of worlds,” Scully said.
Find more information about NASA’s Dawn mission here:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dawn/
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-287-4115
gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2024-178
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Last Updated Dec 20, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
Earth Observer Earth Home Earth Observer Home Editor’s Corner Feature Articles Meeting Summaries News Science in the News Calendars In Memoriam More Archives 4 min read
2024 AGU Fall Meeting Hyperwall Schedule
NASA Science at AGU Fall Meeting Hyperwall Schedule, December 9-12, 2024
Join NASA in the Exhibit Hall (Booth #719) for Hyperwall Storytelling by NASA experts. Full Hyperwall Agenda below.
***Copies of the 2025 NASA Science Calendar will be distributed at the NASA Exhibit at the start of each day.***
MONDAY, DECEMBER 9
3:20 – 3:40 PM From Stars to Life: The Power of NASA Science Dr. Nicola Fox 3:40 – 4:00 PM NASA Planetary Science Division: 2024 Highlights Eric Ianson (PSD Deputy Director) 4:00 – 4:20 PM NASA Earth Science Overview Dr. Karen St. Germain 4:20 – 4:40 PM NASA Astrophysics: Looking Forward Dr. Mark Clampin 4:40 – 5:00 PM Helio Big Year Wind-Down and a Look Ahead Dr. Joseph Westlake 5:00 – 5:20 PM NASA Biological & Physical Sciences Overview Dr. Lisa Carnell 5:20 – 5:40 PM Astrobiology: The Science, The Program, and The Work Dr. Becky McCauley Rench TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10
10:15 – 10:30 AM Integration of Vantage Points and Approaches by NASA Earth Science Division Dr. Jack Kaye 10:30 – 10:45 AM Life after launch: A Snapshot of the First 9 Months of NASA’s PACE Mission Jeremy Werdell 10:45 – 11:00 AM Foundation Model in Earth Science: Towards Earth Science to Action Tsengdar Lee 11:15 – 11:30 AM NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer: Supporting a More Equitable, Impactful, and Efficient Scientific Future Kevin Murphy 11:30- 11:45 AM 30 Years of GLOBE: Advancing Earth System Science, Education, and Public Engagement Amy P. Chen 11:45 – 12:00 PM 2024 NASA Visualization Highlights Mark Subbarao 12:30 – 1:45 PM Grand Prize Winners of 2024 AGU Michael H. Freilich Student Visualization Competition Introductory Remarks from AGU & NASA Steve Platnick Thawing History: Retracing Arctic Expeditions in a Warming World Dylan Wootton Monitoring the Weather in Near Real-Time with Open-Access GOES-R Data Jorge Bravo Mitigating Agricultural Runoff with Tangible Landscape Caitlin Haedrich Earth Observation for Disaster Response: Highlighting Applied Products Patrick Kerwin 2:15 – 2:30 PM Water Science to Water Action John Bolten 2:30 – 2:45 PM Analyzing Space Weather at Mars Gina DiBraccio, Jamie Favors 2:45 – 3:00 PM NASA Airborne in the Arctic: An overview of the NASA Arctic Radiation-Cloud-aerosol-Surface-Interaction eXperiment (ARCSIX) Patrick Taylor 3:00 – 3:15 PM Science Activation and the 2023-24 Eclipses Lin Chambers 3:30 – 3:45 PM Tracking Extreme Fires in 2024 Douglas Morton 3:45 – 4:00 PM BioSCape: A Biodiversity Airborne Campaign in South Africa Anabelle Cardoso 4:00 – 4:15 PM U.S. Greenhouse Gas Center Lesley Ott 4:15 – 4:30 PM Data Governance and Space Data Ethics in the Era of AI: NASA Acres at the Leading Edge Alyssa Whitcraft, Todd Janzen 5:00 – 5:15 PM Global GEOS Forecasts of Severe Storms and Tornado Activity Across the United States William Putman 5:15 – 5:30 PM NASA Earth Action Empowering Health and Air Quality Communities John Haynes 5:30 – 5:45 PM The Habitable Worlds Observatory Megan Ansdell WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11
10:15 – 10:30 AM From Orbit to Earth: Exploring the LEO Science Digest Jeremy Goldstein 10:30 – 10:45 AM Hello, Hello Again: How Lunar Samples Introduced Us to the Solar System, and What We’ll Learn When We Meet Again Dr. Barbara Cohen 10:45 – 11:00 AM Planetary Defenders: How NASA Safeguards Earth from Asteroids Kelly Fast 11:15 – 11:30 AM Bringing Science Data Home Philip Baldwin 11:30 – 11:45 AM Fast-Tracking Earth System Science into Action: The Vision for the Integrated Earth System Observatory Cecile Rousseaux 11:45 – 12:00 PM A Decade of Monitoring Atmospheric CO2 from Space Junjie Liu 12:30 – 1:45 PM Grand Prize Winners of 2024 AGU Michael H. Freilich Student Visualization Competition Introductory Remarks from AGU & NASA Dr. Jack Kaye Photogrammetric Modeling and Remote Identification of Small Lava Tubes in the 1961 Lava Flow at Askja, Iceland Mya Thomas Monitoring Air Quality Using MODIS and CALIPSO Data in Conjunction with Socioeconomic Data to Map Air Pollution in Hampton Roads Virginia Marilee Karinshak Visualizing UAV-Based Detection and Severity Assessment of Brown Spot Needle Blight in Pine Forests Swati Singh Different Temperatures of a Solar Flare Crisel Suarez 2:15 – 2:30 PM Ancient and Modern Sun Gazing: New view of our star as seen by CODEX and upcoming missions MUSE, PUNCH and SunRISE Dr. Nicholeen Viall, Dr. Jeff Newmark 2:30 – 2:45 PM A Stroll Through The Universe of NASA Citizen Science Sarah Kirn 2:45 – 3:00 PM OSIRIS-REx Returned Samples from the Early Solar System Jason Dworkin 3:00 – 3:15 PM To the Moon, Together: Ensuring Mission Success in an Increasingly Busy Lunar Environment Therese Jones 3:30 – 3:45 PM What Goes Around Comes Around – Repeating Patterns in Global Precipitation George Huffman 3:45 – 4:00 PM Parker Solar Probe: Thriving, Surviving, and Exploring our Sun to Make Paradigm Shifting Discoveries Nour Rawafi, Betsy Congdon 4:00 – 4:15 PM Europa Clipper Curt Niebur 4:15 – 4:30 PM Roman Space Telescope and Exoplanets Rob Zellem 5:00 – 5:15 PM Mars Exploration: Present and Future Dr. Lindsay Hays 5:15 – 5:30 PM Superstorm: The surprise entry into the Helio Big Year celebration of the Sun, and possibly a foreshadowing of what’s to come during Solar Maximum Kelly Korrek 5:30 – 5:45 PM From EARTHDATA to Action: Enabling Earth Science Data to Serve Society Katie Baynes THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12
10:15 – 10:30 AM Geospace Dynamics Constellation: The Space Weather Rosetta Stone Katherine Garcia-Sage, Doug Rowland 10:30 – 10:45 AM Future of Magnetosphere to Ionosphere Coupling Lara Waldrop, Skyler Kleinschmidt, Sam Yee 10:45 – 11:00 AM NASA ESTO: Launchpad for Novel Earth Science Technologies Michael Seablom 11:00 – 11:15 AM From Leaf to Orbit: NASA Research Reveals the Changing Northern Landscape Dr. Liz Hoy 11:30 – 11:45 PM OpenET: Filling a Critical Data Gap in Water Management Forrest Melton 11:45 – 12:00 PM Dragonfly: Flights of Exploration Across Saturn’s Moon Titan, an Organic Ocean World Zibi Turtle 12:00 – 12:15 PM Venus and DAVINCI Natasha Johnson 12:15 – 12:30 PM IMAP: The Modern-Day Celestial Cartographer Prof. David J. McComas Share
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Last Updated Dec 04, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 3 min read
Sols 4368-4369: The Colors of Fall – and Mars
This image shows all the textures — no color in ChemCam remote-imager images, though — that the Martian terrain has to offer. This image was taken by Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) aboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Nov. 18, 2024 — sol 4367, or Martian day 4,367 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 02:55:09 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL Earth planning date: Monday, Nov. 18, 2024
I am in the U.K., where we are approaching the time when trees are just branches and twigs. One tree that still has its full foliage is my little quince tree in my front garden. Its leaves have turned reddish-brown with a hint of orange, fairly dark by now, and when I passed it this afternoon on my way to my Mars operations shift, I thought that these leaves have exactly the colors of Mars! And sure enough, today’s workspace is full of bedrock blocks in the beautiful reddish-brown that we love from Mars. But like that tree, it’s not just one color, but many different versions and patterns, all of many reddish-brown and yellowish-brown colors.
The tree theme continues into the naming of our targets today, with ChemCam observing the target “Big Oak Flat,” which is a flat piece of bedrock with a slightly more gray hue to it. “Calaveras,” in contrast, looks a lot more like my little tree, as it is more reddish and less gray. It’s also a bedrock target, and APXS and MAHLI are observing this target, too. APXS has another bedrock target, called “Murphys” on one of the many bedrock pieces around. MAHLI is of course documenting Murphys, too. Let’s just hope that this target name doesn’t get any additions to it but instead returns perfect data from Mars!
ChemCam is taking several long-distance remote micro-imager images — one on the Gediz Vallis Ridge, and one on target “Mono Lake,” which is also looking at the many, many different textures and stones in our surroundings. The more rocks, the more excited a team of geologists gets! So, we are surely using every opportunity to take images here!
Talking about images… Mastcam is taking documentation images on the Big Oak Flat and Calaveras targets, and a target simply called “trough.” In addition, there are mosaics on “Basket Dome” and “Chilkoot,” amounting to quite a few images of this diverse and interesting terrain! More images will be taken by the navigation cameras for the next drive — and also our Hazcam. We rarely talk about the Hazcams, but they are vital to our mission! They look out from just under the rover belly, forward and backward, and have the important task to keep our rover safe. The forward-looking one is also great for planning purposes, to know where the arm can reach with APXS, MAHLI, and the drill. To me, it’s also one of the most striking perspectives, and shows the grandeur of the landscape so well. If you want to see what I am talking about, have a look at “A Day on Mars” from January of this year.
Of course, we have atmospheric measurements in the plan, too. The REMS sensor is measuring temperature and wind throughout the plan, and Curiosity will be taking observations to search for dust devils, and look at the opacity of the atmosphere. Add DAN to the plan, and it is once again a busy day for Curiosity on the beautifully red and brown Mars. And — hot off the press — all about another color on Mars: yellowish-white!
Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University
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Last Updated Nov 20, 2024 Related Terms
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