States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. President GW Bush - January 29, 2002

But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.

The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it. Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

A scientific smart bomb crashed into Comet Tempel 1 on July 4th 2005, blasting a sparkling shower of icy debris into space in a 23,000-mph Fourth of July spectacular 83 million miles from Earth. 2005 - spaceflightnow

'Near-Earth object' should miss striking Earth, but discovery still highlights risks.

April 12, 2005 - WASHINGTON -- Astronomer David Tholen spotted it last year in the early evening of June 19, using the University of Arizona's Bok telescope. It was a new "near-Earth object," a fugitive asteroid wandering through space to pass close to Earth. Tholen's team took three pictures that night and three the next night, but clouds blocked further observations. They reported their fixes to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., and moved on. Six months later, Tholen's object was spotted again in Australia as asteroid "2004 MN4." In the space of five days, startled astronomers refined their calculations as the probability of the 1,200-foot-wide stone missile hitting Earth rose from one chance in 170 to one in 38. They had never measured anything as potentially dangerous to Earth. Impact would come on Friday the 13th in April 2029. Later, additional observations showed that the asteroid would miss, but only by 15,000 to 25,000 miles -- about one-tenth the distance to the moon. Asteroid 2004 MN4 was no false alarm. Instead, it has provided the world with the best evidence yet that a catastrophic encounter with a rogue visitor from space is not only possible but probably inevitable. It also demonstrated the tenacity of the small band of professionals and amateurs who track potential impact asteroids and highlighted the shortcomings of an international system that pays scant attention to their work.

"I used to say the total number of people interested in this was no more than one shift at a McDonald's restaurant," said David Morrison, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center and a student of near-Earth objects for nearly three decades. "Now it's maybe two shifts."

The vast majority of near-Earth objects are asteroids -- huge rocks or chunks of iron that travel around the sun in eccentric orbits that cross Earth's path periodically. The rest are comets -- ancient piles of dust, stones and ice that come in from the edges of the solar system.

"The good news is that comets represent 1 percent of the danger," said Donald K. Yeomans, who manages NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The bad news is that should we find one, there's not a lot we can do about it. . . . We detect them only nine months from impact."

Asteroids, by contrast, generally offer decades or even centuries of warning -- unless they are too small to detect, in which case there is no warning at all. Asteroid 2004 MN4 is a "regional" hazard -- big enough to flatten Texas with an impact equivalent to as much as 1,600 megatons of dynamite (the largest manmade nuclear explosion had a yield of 50 megatons ). Even though it will be a near miss in 2029, that will not be the last word. In fact, 2004 MN4 could come close again in 2034, 2035, 2036, 2037, 2038 or later.

So, what can be done? The first thought, depicted in the 1998 movies "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," is to nuke the intruder into small pieces so it will burn up in Earth's atmosphere. Many scientists say instead of obliterating the target, such a bomb could break the asteroid into large radioactive chunks capable of transforming huge stretches of Earth into wasteland. Or the explosion could deflect but not destroy the asteroid, putting it on a future collision course. Since astronomers ruled out an Earth impact, scientists have continued to observe 2004 MN4 whenever possible, but most of the time it is obscured.

"It would be awfully nice to have information so we don't get surprised," said former Apollo astronaut Russell L. "Rusty" Schweickart, who advocates flying a small interceptor mission to plant a transponder on 2004 MN4 to constantly radio its location, tagging it like a grizzly bear. - By Guy Gugliotta The Washington Post

Asteriod update: NO THREAT!!!
Update:

Once again, the planet can breathe a sigh of relief. After making further observations of asteroid 2003 QQ47, astronomers now say there is no threat from this rock. It has been downgraded to a zero (0) on the Torin scale, which says, "The likelihood of a collision is zero, or well below the chance that a random object of the same size will strike the Earth within the next few decades. This designation also applies to any small object that, in the event of a collision, is unlikely to reach the Earth's surface intact."

While this particular asteroid appears to not be a threat to Earth at this time, the Near Earth Object Program and other agencies continue to monitor space for other threats. After all, it is a big universe, and there are a lot of asteroids and comets out there. source

July 2, 2005 - The United States will celebrate Independence Day on Monday by mounting a real-life Deep Impact attack on a comet that's half the size of Manhattan. PAUL TAYLOR reports

American scientists are planning a July 4 fireworks display that is literally out of this world.

Very early on Monday morning, between Mars and Jupiter, a U.S. space probe will crash into a speeding comet, sending up a massive spray of debris that should be visible (through telescopes) on Earth.

The goal of the mission, named "Deep Impact," as was a 1998 movie about a comet threatening life on Earth, is to learn more about the inner composition of comets, which may contain pristine elements left over from the formation of the solar system more than 4.6 billion years ago. In fact, the kamikaze probe could shed light on the origins of life itself.

The spacecraft sent up for Deep Impact (whose scientists have been preparing for years and say they chose the name well before the movie appeared) is made up of a mother ship and a so-called "impactor." A day before the planned collision, the two will separate, with the impactor sent into the path of the oncoming comet. The mother ship will pull back to a safe distance of about 500 kilometres to watch the celestial smash-up.

The potato-shaped comet, known as Tempel 1, is about 14 kilometres long and 4.6 km wide, roughly half the size of Manhattan Island. It is hurtling through space at 37,000 kilometres an hour and will essentially run over the tiny probe, which is a meter wide and weighs 370 kilograms.

The impactor, basically a copper disc with a few instruments attached, carries no explosives. But at such a great speed, the collision is expected to generate a force equivalent to the detonation of 5 tonnes of TNT. The blast could gouge out a crater ranging in size from a small house to a sports stadium.

Scientists working for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration readily admit they can't predict the size of the crater accurately because comets are such mysterious bodies. "The important point that everyone has to realize is that the uncertainty is so large that we don't know what to expect," says Dr. Michael A'Hearn, the mission's principal investigator.

But the scientists insist they do know one thing for certain: The crash won't send the comet careening toward Earth. "This is the astronomical equivalent of a 767 airline running into a mosquito," according to Dr. Don Yeomans, of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managing the mission for NASA.

Whatever happens, there will be lots of spectators. Telescopes on Earth and in space, such as the famed Hubble telescope, will be watching, and the impactor will transmit pictures during its death dive, providing unprecedented closeups of a comet.

From its ringside seat, the mother ship -- or "flyby craft" -- will map the newly formed crater and analyze material blasted into space. It will then transmit its data and pictures back to Earth.

Unfortunately, backyard stargazers won't see much. Tempel 1 is relatively small and too dim to see with the naked eye, says Terence Dickinson, editor of SkyNews, a Canadian astronomy magazine.

A fairly large amateur telescope is required, although there is a slight possibility that the impact will make the comet just bright enough to see with binoculars. But you will have to be in a dark location, far from the glare of city lights, and know exactly where to look in the constellation Virgo. Even then, the actual crash will be visible from only some parts of North America.

Because the collision is to take place at 1:52 a.m. Eastern Daylight Savings Time, the comet will have sunk below the western horizon, obscuring the view in Eastern Canada. Only observers in the West will have an unobstructed view (weather permitting) of the impact, when the comet will appear relatively low in the southwestern sky, just to the upper left of the star Spica.

Tempel 1 was discovered in 1867 by German-born astronomer Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel while scanning the skies over Marseilles. It loops around the sun every 5.5 years, which is fairly frequent for a comet. Most take decades, even centuries, to complete one orbit.

"This is a wizened comet," says Mr. Dickinson. "It's a comet that has been around the sun many times -- and the sun has baked it."

That makes Tempel 1 an ideal candidate for studying how comets change. This comet also happens to be at the right place at the right time. NASA needed one that would be relatively close by when the spacecraft was ready for blast off.

The Deep Impact spacecraft was launched six months ago from Cape Canaveral, Fla., and has since travelled almost 431 million kilometres to intercept its quarry.

Although the mission has gone relatively smoothly, the rendezvous and impact still represents a formidable challenge. As NASA states in mission briefing documents: "It's the equivalent of hitting a bullet with a bullet while taking a picture from a third bullet flying by."

Nicknamed dirty snowballs because they're made up of ice, gases and dust, comets spend most of their time in deep space. Some have very elongated orbits that occasionally bring them much closer to the sun, which then heats them up and produces jets of gas and dust that form a distinctive "tail" extending far into space.

Some astronomers have put forward a theory that comets delivered the elements of life to the primordial Earth. They argue that a steady bombardment of comets over millions of years could have brought some of the water that now fills the oceans and provided critical organic matter necessary for life.

However, observations of passing comets suggest that the molecular structure of the water found in them may be slightly different than the liquid in Earth's oceans. Even so, proponents of the theory point out that the outer surfaces of comets are altered, or "cooked," during each close encounter with the sun.

To gain a better understanding of their original composition, astronomers need to "see" what's inside them -- which is precisely what Deep Impact is intended to do. Blasting a sizable crater in Tempel 1 should expose fresh material from the interior.

Aside from advancing scientific knowledge, the data gleaned from Deep Impact may have a very practical application some day, says Philip Stooke, a professor of geography and astronomy at the University of Western Ontario.

If a comet is discovered on a collision course with Earth, scientists may, as in the movie, try to deflect or destroy it. According to Prof. Stooke, the more they know about the nature of comets, the better prepared they will be. - - By PAUL TAYLOR

BY WILLIAM HARWOOD - July 4, 2005 - PASADENA, Calif. (CBS) - A scientific smart bomb crashed into Comet Tempel 1 early today, blasting a sparkling shower of icy debris into space in a 23,000-mph Fourth of July spectacular 83 million miles from Earth.

"Jeez, and we thought it was going to be subtle!" marveled comet expert Donald Yeomans as images of the impact were received at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We've had a far bigger explosion than we anticipated. ... I can't imagine how this could go any better."

Said Rick Grammier, the Deep Impact project manager: "It came together quite well, just phenomenal. It went very much like clockwork. We didn't exercise a single contingency plan."

As it closed in on Tempel 1 at 11 times the speed of a rifle bullet, the impactor beamed back a stream of ever more detailed pictures, showing circular craters, plain-like areas, a long, snaking ridge and jumbled-looking terrain similar to regions on the moon.

"It's illuminating some extremely interesting surface features," Yeomans said, describing the pictures as they as they came in. "That's going to keep the scientists going for a long time. The navigation was perfect, it couldn't have been any better. The impact was bigger than I expected, bigger than most of us expected. So this is going to tell us a great deal about how this comet is put together."

Looking on 5,250 miles away, the Deep Impact mothership that ferried the impactor to Tempel 1 trained two telescopes and an infrared spectrometer on the impact site, studying the subsurface ices blown into space by the collision.

The crater that almost certainly resulted from the impact was not immediately visible in an obscuring cloud of debris that spread outward into deep space like some ghostly fog.

"Obviously, it was a very big impact," principal investigator Michael A'Hearn said at a post-impact news conference. "Presumably, we have a large crater in one of those images that hasn't played back yet.

"Interpreting the ejecta cone ... is going to take a bit of time. There's a lot of structure in it that's of interest to understanding the nature of the comet. We'll be working that over the next half day and weeks and months and years. I just look forward to a wealth of data that will take me to retirement."

While he provided no details, A'Hearn said flyby craft's infrared spectrometer captured clear chemical signatures of various icy compounds including some that were clearly unexpected. During the final stages of the encounter flight controllers frequently gasped and broke out in repeated cheers as more detailed images rolled in from space.

"I'm at a loss to explain just how on Earth our little washing machine-sized impactor caused such a disturbance some 83 million miles away," said the normally unflappable Yeomans.. "This is going to take some work to explain, but it's sure taken me by surprise. And I suspect some of my colleagues up in the science area are equally surprised."

The flyby spacecraft had just 13 minutes to collect and transmit its highest-priority data before re-orienting itself, bringing protective dust shields to bear as it fell behind the comet, passing just 300 miles below the Washington, DC-size nucleus at closest approach. About 27 minutes later, the flyby craft turned back toward the receding comet for additional observations, surviving its close flyby of Tempel 1 in near-perfect health. By then, A'Hearn said, the expanding ejecta cone was larger than the nucleus of the comet and still evolving.

Back on Earth, meanwhile, astronomers in virtually every major observatory in the world with a view of the collision aimed their telescopes at Tempel 1 to monitor the flash of the impactor's destruction. The Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Infrared Telescope and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory also monitored the collision from Earth orbit. Hubble measured a two-magnitude increase in light output, corresponding to about a six-fold jump in brightness. Before-and-after images from Hubble showed a distinct brightening with a fair amount of structure in the debris cloud.

Tempel 1 was just above the southwestern horizion for observers in the extreme western United States, but it was not immediately known how many amateurs might have been able to detect the sudden brightening that signaled the impactor's crash. But it was the flyby spacecraft that had the best seat in the house, making its own observations while relaying final close-up images from the impactor taken just a few minutes before its kamikaze-like destruction.

In its final few shots, Yeomans estimated the impactor's camera was able to detect features as small as about eight inches across. The final picture was snapped just 3.7 seconds before impact. For comparison, the European Space Agency's Giotto probe was unable to detect features on Halley's Comet in 1986 smaller than about the length of a football field.

To give the small impactor enough mass to excavate a significant crater, it was loaded with enough copper to make 45,000 pennies. Copper was chosen for the bulk of the impactor's mass because it is not present in comets, allowing astronomers to ignore the remains of the spacecraft in spectroscopic studies of the resulting debris cloud.

While it will take time to fully analyze the downlinked data, astronomers almost certainly will learn more than enough to re-write their textbooks about cometary structure and evolution. On a more fundamental level, the $333 million Deep Impact mission will shed light on the composition of the cloud of gas and dust that coalesced to form the solar system 4.6 billion years ago.

And while it was not a primary goal of the mission, the deep space fireworks display will give scientists and engineers valuable insights into what might be needed someday to divert or destroy a comet on a collision course with Earth.

"It's considerably brighter, there's considerably more material coming off than I thought," Yeomans said, watching the initial impact images come in. "The predictions on the science team were all over the map. Someone won a fairly large-size pool here with a long-shot prediction of a rather extraordinary impact. "We've got an object the size of a washing machine going in here creating a crater and ejecta that's just enormous. At least that's the way it looks like now. ... One of our science team members actually predicted the impact would release sub-surface pressure and we'd have a far bigger explosion than they anticipated. That may be what happened, I don't know."

Deep Impact was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Jan. 12. The impactor was released from the flyby spacecraft early Sunday, roughly 24 hours before the collision, at a point in space about 500,000 miles in front of Tempel 1. As the much-faster comet overtook the two spacecraft, a steady stream of images was transmitted to Earth, revealing more and more surface detail as the distance between the hunters and their quarry closed. The final few pictures were quickly assembled into a sort of stop-action movie, showing the nucleus grow from a small, unfocused blur of light to a sharply defined, cratered body with a wealth of surface detail.

Tempel 1 originated in the Kuiper Belt, a broad flattened disk of icy debris extending from the orbit of Neptune to well beyond Pluto. Disturbed by gravitational interactions, primarily involving Jupiter and Saturn, a Kuiper Belt comet can fall into the inner solar system and become captured in a so-called short-period orbit. In the early solar system, gravitational encounters also threw large numbers of comets into a vast, spherical shell known as the Oort Cloud. Comets that eventually fall back into the inner solar system from the Oort Cloud typically have orbits measured in millions of years.

"Comets formed in the outer part of the solar system and preserve clues to its formation," said A'Hearn. "They formed from Jupiter on out to beyond Neptune four-and-a-half billion years ago, together with all the planets. The inner ones got ejected to the Oort Cloud, which extends halfway to the next star, whereas the ones that formed in the Kuiper Belt are probably still in the Kuiper Belt.

"We are examining comets that come in from the Kuiper Belt with Deep Impact. The problem in understanding the comets is, each time the comet goes close to the sun, the surface layer gets heated and this changes the surface layers. So it's only the interior that preserves the clues to the formation of the solar system."

One reason for the current interest in comets is the believe they may have played a major role in the development of Earth's biosphere.

"In terms of their relationship with life, they may well have brought the water and carbon-based molecules to the early Earth that allowed life to form," Yeomans said in an interview for the author's book "Space Odyssey: Voyaging Through the Cosmos." "Subsequent collisions may have punctuated the evolution, wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and so allowed only the mammals to move forward. "So in a sense, we may owe our position atop the world's food chain to the fact that the dinosaurs checked out as a result of an impact. So I think there's an increased realization that comets and asteroids are not just the flotsam and jetsam of the solar system. They really are, next to the sun itself, probably the most important objects in terms of power over life." - spaceflightnow

By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press CAPE CANAVERAL - Imagine last year's tsunami, last month's earthquake in Pakistan, and Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma all rolled into one - and then some. If nations can't handle those calamities, what's going to happen when an asteroid collides with Earth? In 30 years, there is a 1-in-5,500 chance that a smallish asteroid will land a bull's eye on our planet. At 360 yards wide, it could take out New York City and much of the surrounding area.

Fortunately, experts believe further observations of the asteroid, 99942 Apophis, will almost certainly rule out an impact in 2036. Nevertheless, it's precisely that kind of predictable and preventable threat - and the thought of being ill-prepared for it - that alarms the world's normally intrepid spacefarers who are calling for action.

They issued an open letter at the Association of Space Explorers' annual congress last month in Salt Lake City, making a rare, united push for strategies and spacecraft to prevent a cosmic pileup.

Two of the astronauts - Apollo 9's Rusty Schweickart and shuttle and space station veteran Ed Lu - have even helped establish a foundation to spotlight the issue.

"There are always natural disasters and it always seems as though the preparation is somewhat less than adequate. But we have had a series of quite substantial ones here in the last year," Schweickart said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Hollywood's depiction of cosmic collisions - think Armageddon and Deep Impact- has heightened public awareness, "but regrettably with the wrong solutions and overdramatization," Schweickart said. "You don't want to send up Bruce Willis and others to save us. That's Hollywood silliness," he said, chuckling. Instead, technology is far enough along that an asteroid could be deflected before hitting Earth, he said.

For now, the astronauts are being cautious - some say too cautious - in their approach.

"A lot of the folks working in this area are really attuned to not being Chicken Little, saying, 'Hey, this is going to kill us, it's going to kill us,' " Lu said. "That's not what we're saying. We're saying that you need to start thinking about it ahead of time because afterward is way too late.

"The possible consequences are way worse than your run-of-the-mill natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis and hurricanes. As bad as they may be, this can dwarf them."

Astronauts know better than most just how small and fragile and vulnerable the planet is.

"When you go around it in an hour and a half, again and again and again and again, day after day, in some cases now, month after month after month, the Earth becomes a pretty small place," Schweickart said. "And then, of course ... most astronauts tend to be aware of things like asteroids and their impacts. I mean, we romped around the moon after spending years in preparation by looking at every impact crater and volcano here on the Earth."

It's time, the space explorers say, for NASA to step up to the plate.

The association wants NASA to expand its Spaceguard Survey, a program that discovers and tracks near-Earth objects - asteroids and comets - that are at least two-thirds of a mile across. So far, 807 of an estimated 1,100 of these big rocky asteroids have been discovered in the inner solar system along with 57 comets; California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is plotting their future tracks.

An asteroid two-thirds of a mile wide, at impact, would be enough to easily take out a good-sized European country. By comparison, an asteroid or comet believed to be six to seven miles across wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The space explorers want the many smaller, but still dangerous asteroids tracked as well. Altogether, 3,611 near-Earth asteroids of all sizes have been discovered, with an estimated 100,000 more capable of setting off a tsunami the size of the one that shook the Indian Ocean last December. Scientists are carefully watching Apophis, which will whiz by Earth in 2029, passing within an unnerving 18,640 miles. That's a few thousand miles closer than many communications satellites and 220,000 miles closer than the moon. In 2036, the concern is that it will move in even closer, leading to the 1-in-5,500 chance it will strike.

For a few hundred million dollars, the astronauts say, NASA could launch a scouting mission to Apophis in the next decade or two to place a radio transponder on the surface and thereby plot its course. But Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's near-Earth object program, contends that most likely, radar and telescope observations will ultimately rule out any risk of impact.

Schweickart agrees that based on the current odds, a deflection mission for Apophis would be a waste of money. "But the question is, do I agree with it when it's 1-in-100, when it's 1-in-50, if it's 1-in-20. That is a policy question. At what probability do you begin to spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in order to do something?"

That's not the only sticky policy question.

Are some places on the planet more dispensable than others? The point of impact, for instance, could be inadvertently shifted from one part of the world to another by an intervening spacecraft, jeopardizing one country instead of another. Who's liable if an asteroid-deflecting mission goes awry? Indeed, who decides if such a mission is needed and how far in advance should that decision be made?

Nuclear electric propulsion would be ideal for quickly getting spacecraft to potential killer asteroids and nudging them out of Earth's way, the astronauts say. But the technology for such an "asteroid tugboat" is on hold, a recent casualty of budget cuts.

Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is sympathetic to the astronauts' concerns and has asked NASA to see what might be needed to protect Earth from asteroid impacts.

Nuclear-powered spacecraft could either land on the asteroid and apply a small but continuous force over months in order to alter its Earth-smashing course, or hover above the asteroid and use its gravity to push it aside. Forget about any sensational last-minute asteroid crackups, Armageddon style; the pieces could wind up on a collision course with Earth.

Schweickart and Lu's B612 Foundation - named after the home asteroid of the Earth-visiting prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince- is pushing for an orbit-altering demonstration by 2015 on a harmless, way-out-of-the-way asteroid.

The European Space Agency also is proposing a practice mission called Don Quixote to alter an asteroid's course, but it's yet to be formally approved. NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft smashed into a comet for scientific reasons in July; by design, it barely altered the comet's path.

"We're sitting in a shooting gallery, with hundreds of thousands of these things whizzing around in the inner solar system. So it's just a matter of time," said Schweickart, board chairman of the B612 Foundation.

Fortunately, the technology to protect us is ready for the task, he said, and that's "the beauty of it." - usatoday.com

Kate Ravilious - Thursday November 10, 2005 - The Guardian

Dangerous asteroids can be towed out of harm's way using the pull of gravity, say two astronauts from the Nasa Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.

Edward Lu and Stanley Love devised the idea of hovering a spacecraft over an asteroid and using the gravitational tug to tow it away from any collision course with Earth.

They calculate that this method could be used on the 320 metre-wide asteroid 99942 Apophis, that is due to swing close to the Earth on Friday, April 13 2029. By nudging it off its trajectory that year they hope to prevent its likely return to strike the Earth in 2035 or 2036. - guardian

By A. J. S. Rayl - November 8, 2005

Engineers, scientists, and officials at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) spent the weekend pouring over data and regrouping after their asteroid chaser Hayabusa on Friday aborted the scheduled release of its lander to the surface of asteroid Itokawa. While the "abort" was a set-back, it was by no means the end of the mission.

Hayabusa will still go for the two touch-and-go landings to collect samples of the asteroid's surface materials slated for November 12 and November 25, Junichiro Kawaguchi, the mission's project manager, told The Planetary Society by email this weekend, but those dates may now change. Kawaguchi also said that they hope to release the lander, named Minerva, short for MIcro/Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for Asteroid, during one of those descents.

Hayabusa - which means "falcon" in Japanese -- began its descent from a "hovering" position about 3 kilometers (almost 2 miles) from the asteroid in the early morning hours Japan Standard Time (JST) on November 4. The spacecraft was to have descended to just about 30 meters (100 feet) above the asteroid to test several instruments, and then move in closer to about 15 meters (50 feet) to release a target marker and then Minerva.

By Sunday, Hayabusa had flown up to an altitude of 9.6 kilometers (about 6 miles) from Itokawa and was then to travel back down its "home" position of about 7 kilometers (about 4.4 miles). The spacecraft is currently around 290,689,380 kilometers (about 180 million miles) from Earth.

The team has not yet figured out exactly why the spacecraft aborted at the time it did, but they have an idea it's got something to do with the navigation camera. Hayabusa's navigation, guidance, and control system utilizes an Optical Navigation Camera (ONC), a Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR), a Laser Range Finder (LRF), and Fan Beam Sensors (FBS). It is able to autonomously decide each move on its own by measuring the distance to and the shapes of the asteroid surface using the ONC and LIDAR. "How the spacecraft sees the terrain depends on where the camera is with respect to [the asteroid]," Kawaguchi said. "This may have caused the spacecraft [to be] at a loss for what the target direction [was]."

The spacecraft - which was developed at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), a space science research division of JAXA -- launched from Japan’s Kagoshima Space Center on May 9, 2003. During the last two and a half years, Hayabusa has overcome a number of obstacles during its 1 billion-kilometer (621 million-mile) journey, including several life-threatening solar flares that slowed its arrival a bit. In the days and weeks to come it will be confronting its greatest challenges on the mission yet. - planetary.org

By Nigel Hawkes - November 10, 2005

NO NEED to despatch Bruce Willis into space with a nuclear bomb and a drill: the best way to deal with an asteroid hurtling towards Earth is gently.

Two Nasa astronauts, obviously unimpressed with the plot of the 1998 film Armageddon, say that a better solution would be to tow the asteroid out of the way using nature's weakest force, gravity. Edward Lu, who studied applied physics at Stanford University, and Stanley Love, an expert on the collisional evolution of asteroids, propose in Nature that a 20-tonne unmanned satellite be launched if an Earth-crossing asteroid were detected. Such asteroids have the capacity to plunge the Earth into a long, dark winter.

The impact can often be predicted years or even decades in advance, from a precise knowledge of the asteroid's orbit. So there is time to act; the discussion is about what best to do.

Asteroids are rough lumps of rubble loosely held together, the two astronauts write. That makes landing on them or tethering anything to them very tricky. Simply pushing them out of their orbit is difficult because they are in constant rotation. That means the spin would have to be arrested, or force exerted only at certain moments during the rotation, to achieve the desired effect.

Simply blowing them to bits might work but it would be difficult to predict exactly what would happen to the bits. Some might continue on an Earthwards trajectory.

So Dr Lu and Dr Love suggest an alternative. A large spacecraft hovering in space above the surface of the asteroid would exert on it a tiny force, because of gravity.

All bodies attract one another, but it is an effect usually only significiant with bodies of planetary dimensions. In this case, all that is needed is to achieve a tiny deviation of the asteroid's path to make sure that it misses Earth. So, even the puny gravitational pull of a spacecraft would do the trick, if maintained for long enough. "This saves you from having to land on the asteroid and then trying to stabilise yourself on a flying pile of rock and debris that is spinning all the time," Dr Love said. "By using gravity as your tow line, you can sidle up to an asteroid. Maintain it for a year and that should give it enough nudge to miss the Earth 20 years later."

They may yet get a chance to put their plan into action. An asteroid is due to pass close to Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029.

But the chances of impact are put at comfortingly long odds of 5,560-1. - times online

26 November 2005 - A Japanese probe has become the first craft to collect samples from the surface of an asteroid, scientists say. The probe, called Hayabusa - Japanese for "falcon" - briefly touched down on the Itokawa asteroid and fired a projectile to loosen surface material. Scientists believe it collected the debris, but will only be sure when Hayabusa returns to Earth in 2007.

Moon rocks have been analysed before, but asteroids could contain material from the birth of the Solar System. Scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) confirmed that Hayabusa touched down on Itokawa for a few seconds. Hayabusa is designed to gather asteroid dust for return to Earth

Touching down on the asteroid, which is 290 million km (180 million miles) from Earth, was as tough as landing a jumbo jet in the Grand Canyon, a Jaxa spokesman added. The probe fired a small metal ball into the surface and apparently collected the resulting powdery debris.

"The process of sampling also seems to have gone very well," said Jaxa's Kiyotaka Yashiro.

Japan's Science and Technology Minister Iwao Matsuda praised the effort. "I am delighted to hear that it has collected the samples. It is the world's first such feat and it will contribute greatly to mankind's exploration of space."

Celestial secrets

Saturday's announcement by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) came after a series of problems with the spacecraft. Last Sunday, Hayabusa made a first touchdown on the rotating asteroid - but it failed to collect material after temporarily losing contact with Earth. A separate attempt to land a miniature robot on the asteroid was also unsuccessful.

Hayabusa was launched in May 2003 and has until early December before it must leave orbit and begin its journey home. It is expected to return to Earth and land in the Australian outback in June 2007. Examining asteroid samples is expected to help unlock secrets of how celestial bodies were formed because their surfaces are believed to have remained relatively unchanged over the ages, unlike those of larger bodies such the planets or moons.

Itokawa, named after the Japanese rocket scientist Hideo Itokawa, is 690m (2,300 ft) long and 300m (1,000 ft) wide and has a gravitational pull only 1/100,000th that of Earth's. - bbc

Forget about nuclear weapons, if you need to move a dangerous asteroid, you should use a tractor beam. Think that's just Star Trek science? Think again. A team of NASA astronauts have recently published a paper in the Journal Nature. They're proposing an interesting strategy that would use the gravity of an ion-powered spacecraft parked beside an asteroid to slowly shift it out of a hazardous orbit. Dr. Stanley G. Love is member of the team and speaks to me from his office in Houston.

"the method that we're suggesting is to send a relatively large and heavy spacecraft - not so large and heavy that we can't imagine it - to the asteroid, and instead of trying to blow up the asteroid, or land on it and push the thing aside (both of those ideas have been suggested, but they have some difficulties), we're suggesting you just park the spacecraft next to it and let it hover there. And if you let it hover there for something like a year, very very gradually, the tiny gravitational pull between the asteroid and the spacecraft is going to pull the asteroid over in the direction of the spacecraft. The spacecraft is hovering in a constant distance from the asteroid, and what this means is that it's very gradually pulling the asteroid off course using gravity as sort of a tow line. And if you can get enough warning on your asteroid - if you know it's coming 20 years or so before it's going to hit - then you can get the spacecraft out there and have it pull for about a year, you can pull it enough so that instead of hitting the Earth, it will miss the Earth."

"We were sort of developing the idea as a generic idea, and fly to anything. However, there's Asteroid 99942 Apophis which is supposed to make a close pass of the Earth I think in 2029. And if that asteroid happens to pass through exactly the right point in space as it goes past the Earth, it has a chance to come back in 7-8 years and hit us, which would be bad. And that asteroid is an excellent target for this kind of a mission. If we can get to it before that first Earth flyby, that would line it up for impact the second time around. And the reason for that is that these flybys warp the path of the asteroid so that a tiny tiny change in the flight direction before the flyby gives a huge change in the flight direction after the flyby. So it's like a bank shot in pool. A little tiny mistake on the first part, after the bounce, the mistake gets multiplied. So you could use a gravitational tractor that wasn't nuclear powered and didn't weight 20 tons. You could use a 1-ton, chemical-propelled gravity tractor to pull this asteroid just slightly off course before that Earth flyby so the asteroid is going no where near us."

excerpts from interview with Dr. Stanley G. Love

- more at universe today

12 January 2006 From New Scientist Print Edition Fred Pearce

WITHIN a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing-cold island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, could lie the future of humanity.

The room is a "doomsday vault" designed to hold around 2 million seeds, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. It is being built to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels, earthquakes and the ensuing collapse of electricity supplies. "If the worst came to the worst, this would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet," says Cary Fowler, director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an independent international organisation promoting the project.

New Scientist has learned that the Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year at the behest of crop scientists. The $3 million vault will be built deep inside a sandstone mountain lined with permafrost on the Norwegian Arctic island of Spitsbergen. The vault will have metre-thick walls of reinforced concrete and will be protected behind two airlocks and high-security blast-proof doors. It will not be permanently manned, but "the mountains are patrolled by polar bears", says Fowler.

"If the worst came to the worst, the seed vault would allow the world to reconstruct agriculture on this planet"

The vault's seed collection, made up of duplicates of those already held at other seed banks, will represent the products of some 10,000 years of plant breeding by the world's farmers. Though most are no longer widely planted, the varieties contain vital genetic traits still regularly used in plant breeding.

To survive, the seeds need freezing temperatures. Operators plan to replace the air inside the vault each winter, when temperatures in Spitsbergen are around -18 °C. But even if some catastrophe meant that the vault was abandoned, the permafrost would keep the seeds viable. And even accelerated global warming would take many decades to penetrate the mountain vault.

"This will be the world's most secure gene bank by some orders of magnitude," says Fowler. "But its seeds will only be used when all other samples have gone for some reason. It is a fail-safe depository, rather than a conventional seed bank."

Norway first proposed the project in the 1980s but it was shelved because of security concerns: under an international treaty the Soviet Union had access to Spitsbergen at the time. With the end of the cold war and the signing of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, which gives legal protection to national crops, the door was open for the idea's revival.

The project also comes at a time when there is growing concern about the safety of existing seed banks around the world. Many have been criticised for their poor security, ageing refrigeration systems and vulnerable electricity supplies. In the late 1980s, terrorists ransacked an international potato seed bank in the Peruvian Andes, while more recently anti-globalisation campaigners have demonstrated against other banks.

The new Fort Knox for the world's crops will start by taking seeds from the network of seed banks run in the Philippines, Mexico, Syria, Nigeria and elsewhere by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which is part-funded by the World Bank. "We will then add samples from elsewhere until we have a complete set of the world's crop varieties," says Fowler.

The scheme won UN approval at a meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome last October. A feasibility study said the facility "would essentially be built to last forever".

From issue 2534 of New Scientist magazine, 12 January 2006, page 12 - newscientist.com

In 1995, Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 did something unexpected: it fell apart. For no apparent reason, the comet's nucleus split into at least three "mini-comets" flying single file through space. Astronomers watched with interest, but the view was blurry even through large telescopes. The comet was a hundred and fifty million miles away. We're about to get a much closer look. In May 2006 the fragments are going to fly past Earth closer than any comet has come in almost eighty years.

There's no danger of a collision. "Goodness, no," says Don Yeomans, head of NASA's Near Earth Object Program at JPL.. "The closest fragment will be about six million miles away--or twenty-five times farther than the Moon." That's close without actually being scary." "It looks as though some of the fragments are themselves forming their own sub-fragments," says Yeomans, which means the number could multiply further as 73P approaches. No knows how long the "string of pearls" will be when it finally arrives.

what if "the comet was shattered by a hit from a small interplanetary boulder?" A violent collision could produce faster-moving debris that would reach Earth in 2006. The dust should reach Earth in 2022, "producing a minor meteor shower--nothing spectacular. However," he adds, "the ongoing splitting of the comet means new meteoroids are being sent in new directions, so a future strong meteor shower from 73P remains a real possibility."

when NEO risk communication becomes uncommunicative

based on an ESA release

If a large asteroid such as the recently identified 2004 VD17 about 500 m in diameter with a mass of nearly 1000 million tonnes - collides with the Earth it could spell disaster for much of our planet. As part of ESA s Near-Earth Object deflecting mission Don Quijote, three teams of European industries are now carrying out studies on how to prevent this.

ESA has been addressing the problem of how to prevent large Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) from colliding with the Earth for some time. In 1996 the Council of Europe called for the Agency to take action as part of a long-term global strategy for remedies against possible impacts . Recommendations from other international organisations, including the UN and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), soon followed.

In response to these and other calls, ESA commissioned a number of threat evaluation and mission studies through its General Studies Programme (GSP). In July 2004 the preliminary phase was completed when a panel of experts appointed by ESA recommended giving the Don Quijote asteroid-deflecting mission concept maximum priority for implementation.

Now it is time for industry to put forward their best design solutions for the mission. Following an invitation to tender and the subsequent evaluation process, three industrial teams have been awarded a contract to carry out the mission phase-A studies:

a team with Alcatel Alenia Space as prime contractor includes subcontractors and consultants from across Europe and Canada; Alcatel Alenia Space developed the Huygens Titan probe and is currently working on the ExoMars mission
a consortium led by EADS Astrium, which includes Deimos Space from Spain and consultants from several European countries, brings their experience of working on the design of many successful ESA interplanetary missions such as Rosetta, Mars and Venus Express
a team led by QinetiQ (UK), which includes companies and partners in Sweden and Belgium, draws on their expertise in mini and micro satellites including ESA s SMART-1 and Proba projects

This month the three teams began work and a critical milestone will take place in October when the studies will be reviewed by ESA with the support of an international panel of experts. The results of this phase will be available next year.

No reason for panic - yet

The risk is still small however, and may decrease even further when new observations are carried out. Still, if this or any other similar-sized object, such as 99942 Apophis, an asteroid that will come close enough to the Earth in 2029 to be visible to the naked eye, collided with our planet the energy released could be equivalent to a significant fraction of the world's nuclear arsenal, resulting in devastation across national borders.

Luckily, impacts with very large asteroids are uncommon, although impacts with smaller asteroids are less unlikely and remote in time. In 1908 an asteroid that exploded over Siberia devastated an unpopulated forest area of more than 2000 km²; had it arrived just a few hours later, Saint Petersburg or London could have been hit instead.

Fossils of the Solar System

Asteroids are a part of our planet s history. As anyone visiting the Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona, USA or aiming a small telescope at the Moon can tell, there is plenty of evidence that the Earth and its cosmic neighbourhood passed through a period of heavy asteroid bombardment. On the Earth alone the remains of more than 160 impacts have been identified, some as notorious as the Chicxulub crater located in Mexico s Yucatan peninsula, believed to be a trace of the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Collisions have shaped the history of our Solar System. Because asteroids and comets are remnants of the turbulent period in which the planets were formed, they are in fact similar to time capsules and carry a pristine record of those early days. By studying these objects it is possible to learn more about the evolution of our Solar System as well as hints about the origins of life on Earth.

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is one of these primitive building blocks and will be visited by ESA s Rosetta spacecraft in 2014, as a part of a very ambitious mission - the first ever to land on a comet. Rosetta will also visit two main belt asteroids (Steins and Lutetia) on its way to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission will help us to understand if life on Earth began with the help of materials such as water and organisms brought to our planet by 'comet seeding'.

ESA s Science programme is already looking at future challenges, and its Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan has identified an asteroid surface sample return as one of the key developments needed to further our understanding of the history and composition of our Solar System.

Work still in progress

Asteroids and comets are fascinating objects that can give or take life on a planetary scale. Experts around the world are putting all their energy and enthusiasm into deciphering the mysteries they carry within them.

With an early launch provisionally scheduled for 2011, Don Quijote will serve as a technological scout not only to mitigate the chance of the Earth being hit by a large NEO but also for the ambitious journeys to explore our solar system that ESA will continue to embark upon. The studies now being carried out by European industry will bring the Don Quijote test mission one step nearer. - astrobio.net/

4/13/2006 7:00:00 AM

To: National Desk

Contact: Dr. Michael Salla of the Exopolitics Institute, 808-323-3400, drsalla@exopoliticsinstitute.org

KEALAKEKUA, Hawaii, April 13 / U.S. Newswire / -- Eric Julien, a former French military air traffic controller and senior airport manager, has completed a study of the comet 73P Schwassmann- Wachmann and declared that a fragment is highly likely to impact the Earth on or around May 25, 2006.

Comet Schwassman-Wachmann follows a five-year orbit that crosses the solar system's ecliptic plane. It has followed its five year orbit intact for centuries; but, in 1995, mysteriously fragmented. According to Julien, this is the same year that a crop circle appeared showing the inner solar system with the Earth missing from its orbit. He argues the "Missing Earth" crop circle was a message from higher intelligences warning humanity of the consequences of its destructive nuclear policies. He links this crop circle to May 25, 2006, and identifies the comet Schwassmann-Wachman as the subject of higher intelligence communications.

Using NASA simulations of the comet's path, Julien concludes that impact is likely around May 25 precisely when the comet crosses the Earth's ecliptic plane. While the first fragment will cross at approximately 10 million miles, lagging fragments threaten to collide. While astronomers have stated that the comet poses no direct threat, Julien argues that some fragments are too small to observe. Astronomers have predicted possible meteor showers indicating some cometary debris will enter the atmosphere.

Julien argues that the kinetic energy of even a 'car sized' fragment will impact the Earth with devastating effect. He concludes the May 25 event is tied in to the Bush administration's policy of preemptive use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and the effect of nuclear weapons on the realms of higher intelligences. Regarding its importance, Julien declares: "we have to save lives when we have such information to share with the public". He further claims it important "to preserve all data, historical artifacts and precious material in the event of such a collision." Julien predicts that the comet collision will occur in the Atlantic Ocean between the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer, and generates 200 meter waves. Julien concludes that "each person with this information has to take responsibility to warn potential victims."

His article, "May 25, 2006: The Day of Destiny" is available at: http://www.exopoliticsinstitute.org/EricJulien-En.htm

Sponsored by the Exopolitics Institute: http://www.exopoliticsinstitute.org

US UK planned Iran attack walkthrough in 2004:

Less than three weeks after Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in central Baghdad in April 2003, the U.S. military finished campaign planning to invade Iran. -The Marine Corps finished the first stage of campaign analysis to move forces ashore against a determined enemy without establishing a beachhead. The fictional country of Karona was the target of these wargames - The campaign analysis, called TIRANNT, for "theater Iran near term," posits an Iraq-like maneuver war between U.S. and Iranian ground forces and incorporates lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom. In addition to the TIRANNT effort and the Marine Corps Karona invasion scenario , the military has also completed an analysis of Iran's missile force (the "BMD-I" study), the Defense Intelligence Agency has updated "threat data" for Iranian forces, and Air Force planners have modeled attacks against "real world" Iranian air defenses and targets to establish new metrics. What is more, the United States and Britain have been conducting war games and contingency planning under a Caspian Sea scenario that could also pave the way for northern operations against Iran. here & here

A leading Russian nuclear research center has built a simulator to train personnel to deal with accidents like the 1986 Chernobyl disaster...Researcher Viktor Sidorenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told a conference ahead of the 20th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear-power disaster that the Kurchatov Institute's simulator would help operators run RBMK-type reactors and prepare for possible emergencies. Sidorenko said the situation at the Chernobyl NPP on April 26, 1986, was extremely complicated, and that the simulator reflected this. -

"If radio transmissions are long and powerful enough, the beams actually change the distribution of electrons in the ionosphere, altering for a brief time literally the way the sky is put together. "