Short Sharp Science
Jeff Hecht, contributor
An asteroid the size of a large house will zip within 12,900 kilometres of the Earth at about midday London time on Monday. That’s at least double the size of the asteroids that have previously been observed so close to Earth.
Called 2011 MD, the asteroid was discovered late on Wednesday by an automated asteroid-hunting telescope run by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s LINEAR programme, which had already discovered well over 2000 near-Earth objects. In just over 24 hours, four other groups confirmed the discovery.
The Minor Planet Center at Harvard University does not rate 2011 MD as potentially hazardous because its size – estimated from its brightness – is only 8 to 18 metres. That would make an impressive explosion if it hit the atmosphere, but it wouldn’t reach the ground.
(Image: NASA, ESA, ESO, CXC D. Coe (STScI)/J. Merten (Heidelberg/Bologna))
This is the most colossal cosmic smash-up ever witnessed in the universe. A bundle of galaxies, nicknamed Pandora’s cluster, turns out to be the result of a violent crash between at least four separate galaxy clusters that lasted hundreds of millions of years.
The cluster’s official name is Abell 2744. Using various telescopes including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers have mapped all of its ingredients and pieced together its violent history.
Mercury probably lost its outer layers in a brawl with another rocky world, orbital observations suggest. The new data also shows that its magnetic field is curiously top heavy, stronger in the northern hemisphere than the southern, and leaves open the possibility that the sun-baked world may harbour ice in some of its polar craters.
The data comes from NASA’s Messenger probe, which became the first spacecraft to go into orbit around Mercury in March. Members of the mission team announced the latest results at a press briefing on Thursday.
As the shuttle programme draws to a close, NASA has contracted Lockheed Martin to develop a next-generation vehicle for deep space exploration. Here, the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV), unveiled in May, is undergoing tests at the Lockheed Martin Vertical Test Facility in Colorado to ensure it can withstand the harsh conditions of deep space expeditions.
Whereas the shuttle programme focused on low Earth orbit, the new spacecraft is designed to explore further afield possibly to an asteroid or Mars.
Lockheed Martin was commissioned after the Obama administration scrapped Monster Beats the moon-bound Constellation programme, and MPCV resurrects designs from the Orion capsule, affiliated with Constellation.
Update at 2000 GMT: The rocket reached an altitude of only 2 kilometres, well short of the intended 16 kilometres. Kristian von Bengtson of Copenhagen Suborbitals says he shut down the rocket’s engine by remote control after Cheap MONSTER Beats it started veering off to one side. That was done to keep the rocket from flying outside the area set aside for the launch.
Von Bengtson had not yet seen data from the flight, so he did not yet know why the rocket veered off to the side. But he was pleased overall with the outcome. “We’re going from talking about it and building and testing to actually flying something, so in that sense it’s a big success,” he told New Scientist.
Alexander Smoleevsky and Wang Yue on the surface of “Mars” in February (Image: IBMP/Oleg Voloshin)
Today six men from four countries are celebrating a bizarre anniversary that could become more normal in the future. These “Marsonauts” have spent exactly one full year simulating the journey to the Red Planet and back, mostly sitting inside a mock spaceship,.
That still leaves another 165 days before they complete the 520-day Mars-500 isolation experiment, which is being run by the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow. But what have these wannabe interplanetary travellers achieved so far?