NASA is currently preparing to establish a lunar abode that promises to be an amazing experience. The U.S. Space Agency recently has granted a pioneering construction firm $60 million to build a house on the moon by 2040, aimed not only for space explorers but also for the general public.
The innovative strategy involves sending an enormous 3D printer to the moon. This printer will utilize lunar concrete, composed of rocks and moon dust, to create the structure’s foundation.
Building a moon house
In collaboration with academic institutions and private enterprises, NASA is in the process of designing the essential components like doors, tiles, and furnishings for the moon dwelling.
Furthermore, the blueprint also entails establishing a base on Mars, intending to accommodate those venturing to reside on the Martian surface.
Evolving design
The project is still in its nascent phase, with only conceptual designs from 2022 shedding light on its potential appearance. However, this initial design might significantly evolve over the upcoming years.
For the moment, NASA remained silent about the potential cost for civilians seeking a lunar retreat.
3D printing moon houses
ICON, the Austin-based company that secured NASA’s 2022 contract, brings its terrestrial 3D printing prowess to the table. They meticulously craft opulent homes layer by layer, using their proprietary system, The Vulcan.
This method deploys a blend of cement, sand, and water as its filament, akin to a dense ink extruded from the printer in cohesive bands. Every structural element, such as walls or roofs, are printed distinctly and later assembled. Remarkably, this printing mechanism can complete properties in a mere 48 hours.
Innovative construction method
Since its inception in 2018, ICON has successfully printed over 100 homes in the northern region of Austin. This innovative construction method, with its rapid execution, has piqued interest as a potential solution to the U.S. housing dilemma.
NASA perceives 3D-printed moon houses as a pivotal aspect of its lunar ambitions. Raymond Clinton, aged 71, who holds the position of deputy director at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center’s science and technology division, said:
Victoria Thiem, system safety engineer from Lockheed Martin, checks the temperature of the actual size OSIRIS-REx’s return capsule sample during the recovery rehearsal at Lockheed Martin, Waterton Canyon campus in Littleton, Colorado on Tuesday, June 27, 2023. Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post
NASA completed its first-ever sample return mission from an asteroid today, with a science capsule containing material from an asteroid landing after having traveled on a 1.2 billion-mile journey from the asteroid Bennu. The capsule was released from the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft as it passed by Earth this morning, entering the atmosphere at around 27,000 mph.
The OSIRIS-REx mission, launched in 2016, has collected as much as several hundred grams of asteroid material, which could help scientists understand the earliest stages of the solar system.
“NASA invests in small body missions like OSIRIS-REx to investigate the rich population of asteroids in our solar system that can give us clues about how the solar system formed and evolved,” said Melissa Morris, OSIRIS-REx program executive, in a mission overview briefing. “It’s our own origin story.”
The science capsule was slowed by parachutes and landed in the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range at 10:52 AM ET, a landing area chosen as it is the largest restricted airspace in the United States and has been used for previous NASA sample return missions like Genesis and Stardust.
The landing area is 36 miles by 8.5 miles, and the entire mission has required a very high level of precision — particularly for the spacecraft to rendezvous with the asteroid and collect its sample in 2020.
“The really precise navigation required to orbit Bennu and to touch down and collect our sample, we were under a meter away from our target,” Sandra Freund, OSIRIS-REx program manager, said in a pre-landing briefing. “So that illustrates what kind of navigation precision we’ve had throughout this mission.”
Recovery teams collected the sample from the Utah desert, with a helicopter carrying the sample taking off at 12:15 PM ET. The capsule will be taken to a temporary clean room for first disassembly, removing some of the larger parts such as the backshell. It will then undergo a process called a nitrogen purge in which nitrogen is pumped into the canister to protect the sample. This prevents any of Earth’s atmosphere from entering it as it is shipped to Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where the canister will be opened for the first time so the sample can be analyzed.
Photo by GEORGE FREY/AFP via Getty Images
Why do we need an asteroid sample?
“We’re really interested in trace organic molecular chemistry,” Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator, told The Verge. “We really want to understand — the things that are used in biology today, like amino acids that make proteins and nucleic acids that make up our genes — were they formed in ancient asteroid bodies and delivered to the Earth from outer space?”
If you’re not familiar with models of the formation of the solar system, that idea might sound outlandish, bordering on fantastical. But it’s actually a fairly well-supported and widely accepted theory for how some of the key elements for life came to be on Earth.
It’s important to be clear that the theory is not that life itself arose elsewhere and was delivered to Earth, but rather that the basic building blocks of life — often referred to as organic compounds — could have arrived here billions of years ago carried by asteroids.
That’s been a theory for decades; but to test it out, scientists need access to asteroidal material. Going to visit an asteroid and using instruments on a spacecraft to study it is a good start, but to do the kind of detailed analysis scientists want requires a much bigger laboratory, equipped with instruments like a mile-wide type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron which would be impossible to fit onto a spacecraft.
Another option is to study meteorites, which are pieces of matter (including from asteroids) that come from space and fall to Earth’s surface. That’s how most of this research has been performed historically, using these tiny fragments as samples.
But there are two problems with this approach. Firstly, when a meteorite falls, it doesn’t have the context of where in the solar system it came from. Researchers can’t know its origin, or see what other bodies it was close to, which can give important clues to the interpretation of any data. And secondly, by the time a meteorite has passed through Earth’s atmosphere and landed, it may have picked up matter along the way and been contaminated by the local environment.
When scientists are looking for these trace organic compounds, they need to know that anything they find comes from space and wasn’t picked up here on Earth. So to do that, they need an asteroid sample that is as pristine as possible. That’s where OSIRIS-REx comes in.
A worldwide effort
The OSIRIS-REx mission is the first time that NASA has brought back a sample from an asteroid, but it is following in the footsteps of the Japanese space agency JAXA, which collected two asteroid samples in its historic Hayabusa and Hayabusa 2 missions. Though the first Hayabusa mission gathered just a tiny amount of material, the second mission managed to return around five grams of material from asteroid Ryugu in 2020.
OSIRIS-REx is returning much more material from asteroid Bennu, at around 250 grams, which means that more science can be done — particularly when looking for those small amounts of trace materials. But researchers see the two missions as complementary, rather than competitive.
“Not all asteroids are the same,” said Lauretta, who is also a member of the Hayabusa 2 team. Both Ryugu and Bennu have a similar spinning-top-like shape, but they look very different. Ryugu is larger and more red in color, while Bennu is smaller and more blue. Scientists still aren’t sure what that difference in color means, but being able to analyze and compare the samples on Earth should help understand both how the asteroids are similar and how they differ.
“We look at this as not two sample analysis programs, but one big sample analysis program,” Lauretta said, “because it’s a worldwide effort.”
A window into the early solar system
When scientists want to understand how the Earth formed, they need to look beyond our planet and out into the solar system. Star systems form from enormous clouds of gas that collapse into a star at the center, spinning a disk of material around it.
That’s clear from looking at other star systems, but there’s also evidence from our own solar system: the planets revolve around the sun in the same direction and in a single plane, supporting the idea they formed from a single disk of material.Some of that material coalesced into planets, and some was swept into the earliest asteroids, a number of which still exist today.
NASA is taking “concrete action” to explore the potential threat of UFOs following the release of a landmark report into the phenomena.
The agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson, said it was time to “shift the conversation from sensationalist to science”, having received the recommendations of an independent panel tasked with looking into years of sightings.
While the 16-team panel stressed there is “no reason to conclude” that any sightings have been alien in origin, their report warned any mysterious flying objects were a “self-evident” threat to American airspace.
Their 33-page report said NASA should play a larger role in detecting such phenomena – and the agency has already appointed its first director of UFO research to lead the way.
NASA is also seeking to rename UFOs to UAPs (unidentified anomalous phenomena) to remove a “stigma” that can prevent people from reporting sightings.
Mr Nelson told a news briefing after the report’s release: “We are looking for signs of life, past and present, and it is in our DNA to explore and to ask why things are the way they are.”
He said “we all are entertained by Indiana Jones in the Amazon finding the crystal skull”, citing the impact of Hollywood and pop culture on people’s fascination with the topic.
“There’s a lot of folklore out there. That’s why we entered the arena: to get into this from a science point of view.”
Mr Nelson acknowledged that with billions of stars in billions of galaxies out there, another Earth could exist.
He said: “If you ask me do I believe there’s life in a universe that’s so vast that it’s hard for me to comprehend how big it is, my personal answer is yes.”
His own scientists put the likelihood of life on another Earth-like planet at “at least a trillion”.
NASA’s highly anticipated briefing on Thursday unveiled findings from a year-long, $100,000 study on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), or UFOs. The briefing took an unexpected turn when questions arose regarding two purportedly “non-human” corpses that had been displayed in glass cases during an official unveiling at Mexico’s Congress, sparking excitement within the UFO enthusiast community.
NASA on Thursday (September 14) concluded its highly anticipated media briefing, revealing the results of a year-long, $100,000 study into Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs), also known as UFOs. The primary goal of this report was to shed light on these puzzling phenomena and establish a scientific framework for understanding them.
The briefing took an unexpected turn when questions arose regarding two purportedly “non-human” corpses that had been displayed in glass cases during an official unveiling at Mexico’s Congress, sparking excitement within the UFO enthusiast community.
The mummified specimens were said to have been discovered in the city of Cusco, Peru, and were believed to be approximately 1,000 years old.David Spergel, chair of the NASA UAP study, weighed in on the matter, stating that he had only seen reports about the specimens on social media and did not possess detailed information about their nature.
“We don’t know the nature of those samples,” he said.
He urged the Mexican government to make the samples available to the global scientific community, emphasising the importance of data-driven investigations.
One researcher hypothesizes that experiments carried out by NASA’s Viking landers in 1976 could have inadvertently killed microbes living in Martian rocks. Other experts are skeptical.
Mars, the Red Planet, is seen in this view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, taken in 2003. (Image credit: NASA)
A scientist recently claimed that NASA may have inadvertently discovered life on Mars almost 50 years ago and then accidentally killed it before realizing what it was. But other experts are split on whether the new claims are a far-fetched fantasy or an intriguing possible explanation for some puzzling past experiments.
After landing on the Red Planet in 1976, NASA’s Viking landers may have sampled tiny, dry-resistant life-forms hiding inside Martian rocks, Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at Technical University Berlin, suggested in a June 27 article for Big Think.
If these extreme life-forms did and continue to exist, the experiments carried out by the landers may have killed them before they were identified, because the tests would have “overwhelmed these potential microbes,” Schulze-Makuch wrote.
This is “a suggestion that some people surely will find provocative,” Schulze-Makuch said. But similar microbes do live on Earth and could hypothetically live on the Red Planet, so they can’t be discounted, he added.
However, other scientists believe the Viking results are far less ambiguous than Schulze-Makuch and others make them out to be.
Viking experiments
Each of the Viking landers — Viking 1 and Viking 2 — carried out four experiments on Mars: the gas chromatograph mass spectrometer (GCMS) experiment, which looked for organic, or carbon-containing, compounds in Martian soil; the labeled release experiment, which tested for metabolism by adding radioactively traced nutrients to the soil; the pyrolytic release experiment, which tested for carbon fixation by potential photosynthetic organisms; and the gas exchange experiment, which tested for metabolism by monitoring how gases that are known to be key to life (such as oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen) changed surrounding isolated soil samples.
The results of the Viking experiments were confusing, and have continued to perplex some scientists ever since. The labeled release and pyrolytic release experiments produced some results that supported the idea of life on Mars: In both experiments, small changes in the concentrations of some gases hinted that some sort of metabolism was taking place.
The GCMS also found some traces of chlorinated organic compounds, but at the time, mission scientists believed the compounds were contamination from cleaning products used on Earth. (Subsequent landers and rovers have since proved that these organic compounds occur naturally on Mars.)
However, the gas exchange experiment, which was deemed the most important of the four, produced a negative result, leading most scientists to eventually conclude that the Viking experiments did not detect Martian life.
And in 2007, NASA’s Phoenix lander, the successor to the Viking landers, found traces of perchlorate — a chemical that’s used in fireworks, road flares and explosives, and naturally occurs inside some rocks — on Mars.
The general scientific consensus is that the presence of perchlorate and its byproducts can adequately explain the gases detected in the original Viking results, which has essentially “resolved the Viking dilemma,” Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told Live Science in an email.
But Schulze-Makuch believes most of the experiments may have produced skewed results because they used too much water. (The labeled release, pyrolytic release and gas exchange experiments all involved adding water to the soil.)
Too much of a good thing
“Since Earth is a water planet, it seemed reasonable that adding water might coax life to show itself in the extremely dry Martian environment,” Schulze-Makuch wrote. “In hindsight, it is possible that approach was too much of a good thing.”
In very dry Earth environments, such as the Atacama Desert in Chile, there are extreme microbes that can thrive by hiding in hygroscopic rocks, which are extremely salty and draw in tiny amounts of water from the air surrounding them. These rocks are present on Mars, which does have some level of humidity that could hypothetically sustain such microbes. If these microbes also contained hydrogen peroxide, a chemical that is compatible with some life-forms on Earth, it would help them to further draw in moisture and also may have produced some of the gases detected in the labeled release experiment, Schulze-Makuch proposed.
But too much water can be deadly to these tiny organisms. In a 2018 study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers found that extreme floods in the Atacama Desert had killed up to 85% of indigenous microbes that could not adapt to wetter conditions.
Therefore, adding water to any potential microbes in the Viking soil samples may have been equivalent to stranding humans in the middle of an ocean: Both need water to survive, but in the wrong concentrations, it can be deadly to them, Schulze-Makuch wrote.
It has been generating oxygen abroad the Perseverance rover since its landing in 2021
MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-situ Resource Utilization Experiment) is lowered into the chassis of NASA’s Perseverance in 2019 | Twitter
American space agency NASA on Thursday announced that its oxygen-generating experiment that accompanied Perseverance rover has successfully generated oxygen on the Mars. MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment), developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has generated oxygen for the 16th and final time abroad, NASA said in its blog.
NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said that MOXIE’s performance shows that oxygen can be generated from Mars’ atmosphere. “MOXIE’s impressive performance shows that it is feasible to extract oxygen from Mars’ atmosphere – oxygen that could help supply breathable air or rocket propellant to future astronauts,” said Melroy.
“Developing technologies that let us use resources on the Moon and Mars is critical to build a long-term lunar presence, create a robust lunar economy, and allow us to support an initial human exploration campaign to Mars,” she added.
How MOXIE produced oxygen
MOXIE has been generating oxygen abroad the Perseverance rover since its landing in 2021.
Oxygen is produced through an electrochemical process that separates one oxygen atom from each molecule of carbon dioxide pumped in from Mars’s thin atmosphere. They are analysed to check the purity and quantity of the oxygen produced once these gases flow through the system.
According to NASA, a total of 122 grams of oxygen was generated by MOXIE, which is twice as much as NASA’s original goals for the instrument. It also added that the oxygen produced is of 98 per cent purity, making it suitable for breathing and fuel.
After its success, the next step would be to create a full-scale system that includes an oxygen generator like MOXIE and a way to liquefy and store that oxygen.
Director of technology demonstrations, Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), Trudy Kortes said that they were proud to have supported the breakthrough.
“We’re proud to have supported a breakthrough technology like MOXIE that could turn local resources into useful products for future exploration missions,” said Kortes. STMD funds the MOXIE demonstration.
“By proving this technology in real-world conditions, we’ve come one step closer to a future in which astronauts ‘live off the land’ on the Red Planet,” she said.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captures image of most distant star, Earendel.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured an image of the most distant star known as ‘Earendel’. Utilising the gravitational lensing technique, this breakthrough offers profound insights into the early universe and its initial stars, reported HT Tech.
In parallel to the legacy of the renowned Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope from NASA has focused its gaze on the farthest star ever identified. While the Hubble initially glimpsed this star, the James Webb Telescope, armed with its specialised camera known as NIRCam, has now zoomed in on it, unveiling Earendel as a super-hot and super-bright B-type star, surpassing the heat of the Sun.
Earendel, situated in the Sunrise Arc galaxy, resides at such an immense distance that its visibility is made possible through the interplay of natural phenomena and advanced technology, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. The massive galaxy cluster known as WHL0137-08 distorts space, rendering distant objects seemingly larger.
While much of the galaxy appears like copies due to this distortion, Earendel emerges as a singular point of light. Scientists have deduced that Earendel is incredibly minuscule, approximately 4,000 times tinier than our usual observable threshold. This designation positions it as the most remote star ever detected, having emerged just a billion years following the Big Bang.
NEWS 🚨: NASA’s James Webb telescope has captured an image of the most distant known star in the universe
US space agency says images from Hubble telescope show dozens of boulders floating away after collision.
An illustration depicts NASA’s DART satellite about to collide with the Dimorphos asteroid [Steve Gribben for Johns Hopkins APL/NASA via AP Photo]The United States space agency says dozens of rock fragments were sent into space when it conducted a successful effort in 2022 to knock an asteroid off its path by making a satellite collide with it.
In a press release on Thursday, NASA said images captured by the Hubble space telescope show a “swarm of boulders” released after the collision, which was meant to test a method of planetary defence.
“We see a cloud of boulders carrying mass and energy away from the impact target. The numbers, sizes, and shapes of the boulders are consistent with them having been knocked off the surface of Dimorphos [the asteroid] by the impact,” David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles, a planetary scientist who uses Hubble to track changes in the asteroid, said in the press release.
“This tells us for the first time what happens when you hit an asteroid and see material coming out up to the largest sizes. The boulders are some of the faintest things ever imaged inside our solar system.”
The impact, which took place in September, was part of a programme called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), meant to assess whether scientists could shift the trajectory of objects in space.
September’s experiment was hailed as a success: The satellite slammed into the asteroid at about 22,530 kilometres per hour (14,000 miles per hour), successfully altering its course. Jewitt noted that the impact left a crater about 50m (160 feet) wide.
In the future, scientists hope the technique could be used to swat away asteroids on course for potentially catastrophic collisions with Earth.
In the 1950s, with the USSR seemingly sprinting ahead in the space race, US scientists hatched a bizarre plan – nuking the surface of the Moon to frighten the Soviets.
The moment astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped out on to the Moon’s surface in 1969 is one of the most memorable moments in history.
But what if the Moon Armstrong stepped onto was scarred by huge craters and poisoned from the effects of nuclear bombardment?
At first reading, the title of the research paper – A Study of Lunar Research Flights, Vol 1 – sounds blandly bureaucratic and peaceful. The kind of paper easy to ignore. And that was probably the point.
Glance at the cover, however, and things look a little different.
Emblazoned in the centre is a shield depicting an atom, a nuclear bomb, and a mushroom cloud – the emblem of the Air Force Special Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, which played a key role in the development and testing of nuclear weapons.
Down at the bottom is the author’s name: L Reiffel, or Leonard Reiffel, one of America’s leading nuclear physicists. He worked with Enrico Fermi, the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor who is known as the “architect of the nuclear bomb”.
Project A119, as it was known, was a top-secret proposal to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the Moon. Hydrogen bombs were vastly more destructive than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, and the latest in nuclear weapon design at the time. Asked to “fast track” the project by senior officers in the Air Force, Reiffel produced many reports between May 1958 and January 1959 on the feasibility of the plan.
The US was concerned that Soviet missile technology was advancing faster than they could keep up (Credit: Getty Images)
Incredibly, one scientist enabling this horrific scheme was future visionary Carl Sagan. In fact, the existence of the project was only discovered in the 1990s because Sagan had mentioned it on an application to an elite university.
While it might have helped to answer some rudimentary scientific questions about the Moon, Project A119’s primary purpose was as a show of force. The bomb would explode on the appropriately named Terminator Line – the border between the light and dark side of the Moon – to create a bright flash of light that anyone, but particularly anyone in the Kremlin, could see with the naked eye. The absence of an atmosphere meant there wouldn’t be a mushroom cloud.
There is only one convincing explanation for proposing such a horrendous plan – and the motivation for it lies somewhere between insecurity and desperation.
It didn’t help American nerves that Sputnik was launched on top of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile
In the 1950s, it didn’t look like America was winning the Cold War. Political and popular opinion in the United States held that the Soviet Union was ahead in the growth of its nuclear arsenal, particularly in the development, and number, of nuclear bombers (“the bomber gap”) and nuclear missiles (“the missile gap”).
In 1952, the US had exploded the first hydrogen bomb. Three years later the Soviets shocked Washington by exploding their own. In 1957 they went one better, stealing a lead in the space race with the launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite in orbit around the world.
It didn’t help American nerves that Sputnik was launched on top of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile – albeit a modified one – nor that the US’s own attempt to launch an “artificial moon” ended in a huge, fiery explosion. The inferno that consumed their Vanguard rocket was captured on film and shown around the world. A British newsreel at the time was brutal: “THE VANGUARD FAILS…a big setback indeed…in the realm of prestige and propaganda…”
The successful launch of Sputnik in 1957 caused consternation in the West (Credit: Getty Images)
All the while, US schoolchildren were being shown the famous “Duck and Cover” information film, in which Bert the animated turtle helps teach children what to do in the event of a nuclear attack.
Later that same year, US newspapers citing a senior intelligence source reported that “Soviets to H-Bomb Moon On Revolution Anniversary Nov 7” (The Daily Times, New Philadelphia, Ohio) and then followed it up with reports that the Soviets might already be planning to launch a nuclear-armed rocket at our nearest neighbour.
Like with other Cold War rumours, its origins are hard to fathom.
Strangely, this scare also likely motivated the Soviets to develop their plans. Codenamed E4, their plan was a carbon copy of the Americans’, and eventually dismissed by the Soviets for similar reasons – the fear that a failed launch could result in the bomb dropping down on Soviet soil. They described the potential for a “highly undesirable international incident”.
They may have simply realised that landing on the Moon was the bigger prize.
But Project A119 would have worked.
In 2000 Reiffel had his say. He confirmed that it was “technically feasible”, and that the explosion would have been visible on Earth.
The loss of the pristine lunar environment was less of a worry to the US Air Force despite the scientists’ concerns.
“Project A119 was one of several ideas that were floated for an exciting response to Sputnik,” says Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology, “that included shooting down Sputnik, which feels very spiteful. They refer to them as stunts… designed to impress people.
“Now what they did in the end was put up their own satellite, and that took a little while, but they continued this project somewhat seriously, into at least the late 1950s.
“It is a pretty interesting window into the sort of American mindset at that time. This push to compete in a way that creates something very impressive. I think, in this case, impressive and horrifying are a bit too close to each other.”
He isn’t sure that fear of the anti-communist witch hunt made nuclear physicists work on this project. “Anyone who’s in these roles is probably self-selected to some degree,” he says. “They don’t mind doing the work. If they were afraid, they could do a million other things. A lot of scientists did this in the Cold War; they said physics has gotten too political.”
An old NASA satellite is expected to fall to Earth this week, but experts tracking the spacecraft say chances are low it will pose any danger.
The defunct science satellite known as Rhessi will plummet through the atmosphere Wednesday night, according to NASA and the Defense Department.
NASA said Tuesday that the reentry location is not being disclosed, given lingering uncertainty over when and where it might go down. Most of the 660-pound (300-kilogram) satellite should burn up upon return, but some parts are expected to survive.
The space agency said in a statement the risk of anyone on Earth being harmed by plunging satellite pieces is “low” — about 1-in-2,467.
Rhessi — short for the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager — rocketed into orbit in 2002 to study the sun.
Before being shut down in 2018 because of communication problems, the satellite observed solar flares as well as coronal mass ejections from the sun. It captured images in high-energy X-rays and gamma rays, recording more than 100,000 solar events.
Asteroid 2023 FT1 belongs to the Apollo group of asteroids. (Pixabay)
A huge asteroid is headed towards Earth and could make its closest approach to the planet soon. Although asteroids pass closely to Earth on a daily basis, none of them come close enough to impact the surface. However, their close approaches serve as a reminder of the potential danger that asteroids can pose to our planet. That is why agencies like NASA, ESA and others continue to keep an eye on these Near-Earth Objects which have the potential to cause major destruction on Earth if they ever impacted.
NASA has tracked an asteroid heading for Earth today and has revealed important details about the asteroid, such as it speed, distance of closest approach, size and more.
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Asteroid 2023 FT1 details
The asteroid has been named Asteroid 2023 FT1 by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. The same organization has also revealed its trajectory, distance of close approach and expected speed. Asteroid 2023 FT1 will pass Earth today, April 10, at a distance of 7.4 million kilometers. The asteroid is almost as big as an aircraft, with a width of 110 feet.
NASA has also revealed that this space rock is already rushing towards the planet, travelling at a fearsome speed of 23790 kilometers per hour.
It belongs to the Apollo group of asteroids, which are a group of Near-Earth asteroids named after the humongous 1862 Apollo asteroid, discovered by German astronomer Karl Reinmuth in the 1930s.
Protection against asteroids
To counter these asteroids which head for Earth for potential impact, NASA has already carried out the testing of its DART Mission for planetary protection. The space agency crashed a spacecraft into an oncoming asteroid to successfully divert it from its path.
A supermassive blackhole is believed to be rampaging through the universe (Image: PA)
An invisible monster supermassive black hole is feared to be skulking around intergalactic space.
Investigating NASA experts say its incredible speeds – which would take it from the Earth to the Moon in less than 15 minutes – means it is not destroying stars as other black holes have been seen doing.
Instead, the mass has left behind a 200,000 light-years-long line of newborn stars as it billows through galactic gases.
The evidence was found by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, said: “We think we’re seeing a wake behind the black hole where the gas cools and is able to form stars.
It is moving at “incredible speeds”, according to NASA ( Image: NASA)
“So, we’re looking at star formation trailing the black hole. What we’re seeing is the aftermath. Like the wake behind a ship we’re seeing the wake behind the black hole.
“Gas in front of it gets shocked because of this supersonic, very high-velocity impact of the black hole moving through the gas. How it works exactly is not really known.
“This is pure serendipity that we stumbled across it,I was just scanning through the Hubble image and then I noticed that we have a little streak.
“I immediately thought, ‘oh, a cosmic ray hitting the camera detector and causing a linear imaging artefact.’
“When we eliminated cosmic rays we realised it was still there. It didn’t look like anything we’ve seen before.”
The black hole as created several new stars, according to NASA ( Image: STScI / NASA)
The black hole lies at one end of the column, which stretches back to its parent galaxy.
Researchers believe the gas is probably being shocked and heated from the motion of the black hole hitting the gas.
It comes as astronomers claim to have discovered four of the oldest galaxies in the known universe, said to have been created just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
Valentine’s Day 2046 could see an unusual attraction, as a newly discovered asteroid named 2023DW has a 1-in-625 chance of colliding with Earth, according to the European Space Agency’s Near Earth Objects Coordination Center. Although the odds don’t seem high, astronomers consider it a relatively significant risk. However, more precise measurements of the asteroid’s size are needed to more accurately assess the potential harm. Astronomers believe that the asteroid is roughly 50 meters (164 feet) long, approximately the size of an Olympic pool, which could cause some damage if it collided with Earth.
We've been tracking a new asteroid named 2023 DW that has a very small chance of impacting Earth in 2046. Often when new objects are first discovered, it takes several weeks of data to reduce the uncertainties and adequately predict their orbits years into the future. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/SaLC0AUSdP
— NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) March 7, 2023
NASA’s next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with its Orion crew capsule perched on top, is seen in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) before it is scheduled to make a slow-motion journey to its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. March 16, 2022. REUTERS/Thom Baur
NASA’s next-generation moon rocket began a highly anticipated, slow-motion journey out of its assembly plant en route to the launch pad in Florida on Thursday for a final round of tests in the coming weeks that will determine how soon the spacecraft can fly.
Reporting by Steve Nesius in Cape Canaveral; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Maler
