¶An unlikely asteroid impact in 2032. A 50+ meter near-Earth object dubbed 2024 YR4 has a 1.6% probability of impacting Earth in 2032. The object was detected by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in Chile on December 27th. While follow-up observations are likely to reduce this probability of impact further, it currently remains at a Torino scale of 3 as of this writing, which classifies it as a “close encounter, meriting attention by astronomers. Current calculations give a 1% or greater chance of collision capable of localized destruction” [emphasis ours]. While quite unlikely, this event is the second highest Torino scale detection ever, exceeded only by a brief four-day window around Apophis’s detection in 2004 when that much larger object reached 4 on the Torino scale (its size made it capable of “regional devastation”). Note that 2024 YR4 still has a negative Palermo score, which means it’s below the background hazard—i.e., less likely to hit us than “the average risk posed by objects of the same size or larger over the years until the date of the potential impact,”—we just happen to have noticed it. The observation warranted a Potential Asteroid Impact Warning being sent out from the UN-endorsed International Asteroid Warning Network and a request for available telescopes to track the object while it is still observable in an attempt to characterize its orbit more precisely. As new detection systems like the LSST and NEO Surveyor come online over the next few years, we anticipate seeing many more (probably dull) events like this, and the public needs to learn how to evaluate these risks and avoid panic. 2024 YR4 will pass Earth again in 2028, allowing further refinement of its orbital parameters. Unrelatedly, but since we’re talking about NEOs, startup AstroForge announced that Near Earth Object 2022 OB5 is the target of the company’s first asteroid survey mission, the first commercial space flight to go to deep space, which launches with IM-2 next month (IM-2 just arrived at the Cape). Perhaps they’ll send Bruce Willis. |
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 | “The social media reaction to this asteroid announcement has been sharply negative. Care to respond?” XKCD #1239 |
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¶Papers- OSIRIS-REx’s samples of Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023, contain ammonia, formaldehyde, 14 of the 20 amino acids used by life in proteins, as well as all five nucleobases (paper). While these complex organic molecules have been seen in space before, “identifying them in a pristine sample collected in space supports the idea that objects that formed far from the Sun could have been an important source of the raw precursor ingredients for life throughout the solar system.” Interestingly, while life on Earth almost exclusively uses left-handed amino acids, the Bennu samples contain an equal mixture of both left- and right-handed ones—the mystery of life’s homochirality continues. Meanwhile, based on evaporite minerals like halite, sylvite, and trona in the samples, there is evidence that material from Bennu previously resided in a wet, salty environment (paper).
- On the other hand, some of the minerals that we see on Mars, which appear to have formed in the presence of water, could have been formed by liquid CO2 instead (paper). “While others have suggested that liquid CO2 might be the source of some of the river channels seen on Mars, the mineral evidence has seemed to point uniquely to water. However, the new paper cites recent studies of carbon sequestration, the process of burying liquefied CO2 recovered from Earth’s atmosphere deep in underground caverns, which show that similar mineral alteration can occur in liquid CO2 as in water, sometimes even more rapidly.” Mars has CO2 geysers; maybe CO2 forms some of its minerals as well.
- First predicted to explain the ubiquitous < 0.2 keV X-ray background, the Local Hot Bubble (LHB) is a theorized region in which our solar system resides that is filled by a diffuse, million-degree plasma glowing with soft X-ray radiation. The LHB is believed to be the remnant of a past supernova. Data from the eROSITA X-ray telescope was recently used (paper) to map the LHB in 3D—see below for an illustration of the complex neighborhood of our home system, decorated by the scattered scars of past supernovae.
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 | Our local neighborhood of interstellar space, filled with bubbles of hot, diffuse plasma left over from past supernovae explosions. |
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¶PUNCH (riding along with SPHEREx). Two of NASA’s next space science missions will launch near the end of the month and share a Falcon 9 ride to space. We’ll cover the primary mission, SPHEREx, closer to launch, but the lesser-known Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission is also worth taking a look at. PUNCH will gaze inward from the day/night SSO terminator line toward the heart of our solar system. The mission is made up of four formation-flying 40 kg smallsats, with three of them positioned 120° apart, each equipped with a wide-field imaging device (based on the STEREO/Heliospheric Imager and Nagler eyepiece), and a fourth carrying a near-field imager and STEAM, a bonus student-built payload of hard and soft x-ray spectrometers that will search for flares. Together the four imagers will function as a single instrument capable of producing a constant 90° field of view of the Sun and the inner solar system (they do this by rotating a composite trefoil imaging pattern around this FOV). PUNCH ground systems will heavily process the captured imagery, building a 3D model of features in the Sun’s corona (through the use of polarimetry) with the goal of understanding how our star’s outer atmosphere transitions into the solar wind. PUNCH has a 2-year nominal mission duration after its initial 90-day commissioning and will launch from Vandenberg NET February 27th. |
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 | PUNCH’s trefoil imaging pattern, near field imager, and composite field. The mission’s website is really quite informative and worth a look. |
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| ¶News in brief. India launched the NVS-02 navigation satellite to GEO, the first of what will be a record planned 10 launches for India this year ● Unfortunately, NVS-02 is now stranded in a GTO orbit with a low 165 km perigee after its thruster oxidizer valves failed to open (opening and closing valves continues to be one of the hardest parts of space engineering) ● Portland-based startup AscendArc emerged with $4M in seed funding to develop small, low-cost GEO communications satellites ● Sidius Space received FCC approval for their direct-to-device connectivity on LizzieSat ● Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 ⅓ scale demonstrator reached Mach 1.122 (full scale aims for Mach 1.7), marking the first time a privately developed aircraft has flown faster than the speed of sound (the Concorde was a joint development between the French and UK governments) ● Japan successfully launched the Michibiki 6 navigation satellite aboard their fifth H3 rocket ● The UK invested $20M into Orbex, the only UK-owned launch services company, which plans to develop small and medium sized rockets that will launch from the SaxaVord Spaceport ● Apple, who already provides satellite direct-to-cell services via their partnership in Globalstar, has quietly worked with SpaceX to deploy Starlink support in its latest iOS 18.3 update, which is now in testing with a few beta iPhone users on T-Mobile’s network (T-Mobile had already also begun enabling Starlink services on some Samsung phones) ● NASA directed their Planetary Science Analysis/Assessment Groups to pause their work due to executive orders ● ESA awarded a $900M contract to Thales Alenia Space in Italy to lead European aerospace companies in building the Argonaut Luna, ESA’s first lunar lander ● Thales Alenia Space also won a $383M ESA contract to lead the development of EnVision, a mission slated to launch in November 2031 on a 15-month journey to Venus ● Canadian hyperspectral startup Wyvern started publicly sharing EO images from their three Dragonette cubesats as part of their Open Data Program (which is inspired by Umbra’s open data philosophy). |
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 | One of Wyvern's released EO images, shows mining operations in Escondida, Chile. Credit: Wyvern |
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¶Etc.- A super cool timelapse from Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander as it heads toward the Moon. Firefly continues to knock it out of the park on mission comms, and the craft has successfully made two orbital burns with enough precision that it can skip its third planned burn.
- What’s up next for Starship, and what hardware will fly when? (Flight 7’s recovered booster might just need to be reflown if SpaceX wants to keep up a reasonable launch cadence, but this has some precedent since the company reflew the second Falcon 9 booster it recovered as well.)
- SpaceX’s 2024 revenue is estimated at $13B, with Starlink at $8B, launch at $4.2B, and about $700M in HLS and other contracts.
- A timelapse video of the installation of the 133-ton, 34-meter reflector dish on NASA’s newest Deep Space Network antenna, DSS-23. The antenna is the fifth out of six new antennas being built across the network and is being constructed at the Goldstone Space Communications Complex in Barstow, CA.
- Back in September 2023, the STEREO mission (which the wide-field imagers on PUNCH are based on—item above) observed a Coronal Mass Ejection rip the tail off of a comet (Nishimura C/2023P1).
- This visual, interactive solar system exploration history guide is pretty cool.
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JAXA’s Akatsuki Venus orbiter took this image in IR, capturing heat from Venus’s surface, silhouetting the planet’s deepest cloud deck (thicker clouds look darker). Akatsuki launched in 2010 but had a failed Venus orbital insertion maneuver and spent five years orbiting the Sun before a 20-minute attitude control thruster burn successfully placed it in an elliptical Venusian orbit. JAXA lost contact with the orbiter last April. Image: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Damia Bouic |  |
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