Help Find the Next Asteroid Threat to Earth

According to NASA’s Asteroid Fast Facts page, a lot of space material lands on Earth every year. From the NASA page:

“Every day, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles.

“About once a year, an automobile-sized asteroid hits Earth's atmosphere, creates an impressive fireball and burns up before reaching the surface.

Every 2,000 years or so, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth and causes significant damage to the area.”

Image Credit NASA

When is the next one coming? No one knows. But NASA and other organizations worldwide constantly watch out for possible impactors from space. Even so, some escape discovery until they hit. In 2013, a small asteroid, about the size of a six-story building, entered our atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russian. It exploded with a blast more powerful than the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The blast shattered glass in buildings all over the city and caused injuries to more than 1,200 people. It was so bright that scientists estimate it briefly outshone the sun. We had no warning of this event. No one saw it coming.

Many telescopes automatically search the night sky for incoming asteroids, for one with Earth in its sights. But scientists need your help finding them. You may be the one to spot the next one that threatens Earth.

Image Credit NASA

An organization called Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects) currently has 108 projects where anyone, even you, can help scientists make new discoveries. I have written about Zooniverse before, but they have added quite a few new projects since then and more are added every year. You can find them at www.zooniverse.org.

The project to help find potentially dangerous asteroid is at www.zooniverse.org/projects/sandorkruk/hubble-asteroid-hunter. As with all the Zooniverse projects, you get a brief tutorial on what to look for and how to identify a target. Then you are presented with a series of photos. Using what you learned in the tutorial, you identify potential asteroid targets. Once identified, the project scientists analyze the photo to calculate the asteroid’s path to determine if Earth is in the way.

If saving the Earth from asteroid impacts isn’t your cup of tea, look through all of their projects. It’s likely one or several of the others will pique your interest.

Each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and https://oklahoman.com/.

Did NASA Already Find Martian Life?

In 1992, astronomers discovered three objects roughly the size of Earth orbiting another star, the first known exoplanets. No one expected life on those objects because the star was a pulsar, the remains of a star that blew up as a supernova, and the “planets” had actually formed from the debris of that explosion.

Three years later, astronomers found the first true exoplanets orbiting the sun-like star 51 Pegasi. Now, the NASA Exoplanet Archive lists 4113 confirmed exoplanets with more than 3600 exoplanet candidates awaiting confirmation. Astronomers believe that we have only touched the tip of the exoplanet iceberg. Data suggests that our Milky Way galaxy alone contains some two hundred billion planets. As of now, there’s no solid evidence suggesting that life exists on any of them.

But some scientists believe that we already found life on another planet, one much closer to home. In 1976, NASA landed twin spacecraft on Mars, Viking 1 and 2. Each included automated laboratories designed to search for microscopic life on the Red Planet.

Both craft, which landed 4000 miles apart, included a simple test called the Labeled Release experiment. It added a nutrient broth to a small amount of Martian soil and checked to see if any metabolic byproducts, like carbon dioxide, were released. Every test by both landers reported positive results. However, the other experiments on both landers found no organic chemicals, which seemed to preclude any lifeforms. Since then, most scientists decided that some odd chemistry in the Martian soil falsely mimicked those life signs.

Viking Lander, credit NASA

But not all scientists. Gilbert Levin was the principal investigator for the Labeled Release experiment for both landers. In a recent article in Scientific American, he wrote “The Viking LR (experiment) sought to detect and monitor ongoing metabolism, a very simple and fail-proof indicator of living microorganisms. Several thousand runs were made, both before and after Viking, with terrestrial soils and microbial cultures, both in the laboratory and in extreme natural environments. No false positive or false negative result was ever obtained. This strongly supports the reliability of the LR Mars data.”

It may be decades or centuries before we confirm life on an exoplanet, if we ever do. But we may have already discovered life on another planet, right next door.

There are Lots of Earth-like Planets -- How Many are Lifebearing?

Scientists who think about the possibility of extraterrestrial life need data to estimate those possibilities. Because Earth is the one and only known example of a life-bearing planet, it seems logical, therefore, to use ours as a model for life-bearing planets. The first, best place to hunt for alien life would be on planets like Earth

And this is where data is needed. Just how many Earth-like planets exist in our Milky Way galaxy? Fortunately, we have reams of data on planets orbiting other stars from the Kepler space telescope. It spent more than nine and a half years doing nothing but searching for extrasolar planets. It discovered more than 2,600 planets with nearly 3,000 still awaiting confirmation. That’s a lot of data.

One thing astronomers learned from a statistical analysis of that data is that Earth-like planets are rather common. Twenty billion sun-like stars call the Milky Way home, and Kepler teaches us that one in four of them have planets roughly the size of Earth orbiting in the habitable zone, where, as on Earth, liquid water can exist. That’s five billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way. And that’s not even counting the billions of other stars of different sizes than our sun that also possess Earth-sized planets in their habitable zones.

Artist depiction of a habitable exoplanet. Credit NASA-JPL

That sure sounds like the potential exists for a galaxy teeming with life.

Now, astronomers want to check for the actual existence of alien life. We can’t yet send probes to examine those planets. But we can examine the atmosphere of an alien planet for life-supporting gases. According to Eric B. Ford, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, “Scientists are particularly interested in searching for biomarkers – molecules indicative of life – in the atmospheres of roughly Earth-size planets that orbit in the ‘habitable zone’ of sun-like stars.”

With five billion planets to examine, the search might be tedious, but the payoff will be the most amazing scientific discovery ever. And it appears to be only a matter of time before we discover alien life.

The map shows the sky at 10:00 early in the month, 9:00 in the middle of the month, and 8:00 at the end of the month. Map produced using Night Vision star mapping software. 

On or about the first Tuesday of each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

Where is Everybody?

One summer day in 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, leader of the team that built the first nuclear reactor, enjoyed lunch with several fellow physicists. Talk turned to recent UFO reports and the possibility of faster than light travel. Referring to aliens, Fermi suddenly blurted out "Don't you ever wonder where everybody is?" This question led to “The Fermi Paradox.”

Simply stated, if (as we now know) our galaxy contains billions of planets, many of them Earth-like, why haven’t we ever encountered any aliens? Earth is young, in cosmic terms. Many solar systems older than Earth exist, some billions of years older. If life existed on any of them, it would take no more than 50 million years to colonize the galaxy with the rocket technology being developed at that time, a blink of the eye in cosmic terms. So, Fermi wondered aloud, where is everybody?

Over the years, other scientists have suggested various answers.

Water is essential to life as we know it. Earth’s water exists on the surface, but for most of the other worlds in our solar system that possess oceans, four moons, the water is locked underground, below a frozen surface. That may be common for life-bearing planets or moons.

Many of the planets we’ve discovered that could have water are classified as super-Earths, planets up to ten times larger than Earth. The gravity of such planets may well make space travel impossible.

Futurist and astronomer Seth Shostak, says that all intelligent aliens may actually be intelligent machines. We ourselves are on the verge of creating such machines and, within a few thousands of years, all intelligence on Earth may be machine-based, not biological.

Some scientists suggest that alien life may be so different from us, we’d never recognize it. Or, perhaps just as we destroy ants without even realizing it when building a house, maybe all other life forms have been eradicated. Or they wiped themselves out with climate change.

Maybe we have met the aliens and they are us. The “panspermia hypothesis” says life was seeded on Earth by comets (or alien spacecraft?), making us the very aliens we search for.

Even so, we need to keep looking.

From NASA's search for extraterrestrial life. Credit NASA-HST

On or about the first Tuesday of each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.

How Much Does the Sky Weigh?

As the director of the Kirkpatrick Planetarium for several decades, I received many questions from kids on school field trips. They often centered around aliens: do I believed they exist (I do), and do I believe they visit Earth (I don’t).

One of the more interesting questions I ever received was “How much does the sky weigh?” At first blush, it might seem that the answer is simple: nothing. That is not correct.

First, we need to define “the sky.” To answer this question, I count as “sky” our atmosphere and all the water vapor it contains. The Karman line, 60 miles above Earth’s surface, defines the official boundary between our atmosphere and the edge of space, so that is what we have to weigh.

Earth from space. Credit NASA

Sea level atmospheric pressure is 15 pounds per square inch, meaning every square inch of our planet’s surface has 15 pounds of air above it. One square inch is roughly one-third to one-half the size of an adult thumb. That corresponds 60,217,344,000 pounds of air for every square mile. Earth has a total surface area of 201,061,929 square miles. Do the math. Our atmosphere weighs 12,107,415,343,900,000,000 pounds.

According to meteorologists, water vapor averages 0.04% of the volume of Earth’s atmosphere. That means the sky holds 4,824,146,196 gallons of water. At eight pounds per gallon, that’s another 38,593,169,564 pounds of water in the air.

Add it all up, and the total weight of our sky is 12,107,415,382,493,169,564 pounds, more than 12 quintillion pounds! I didn’t say all of that at the time, because I can’t multiply that quickly in my head. I simply told the child that it’s more than all of us could hold.

Now, about those aliens …

On or about the first Tuesday of each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page.

This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.

Classroom Creativity Activities

As a writer of books for children, I try to find ways to bring out their creativity. When I do school readings, I use word-play games to help stimulate the kids’ imagination. For example, my book If You Swallow that Seed (see all my books at http://www.4rvpublishingcatalog.com/wayne-harris-wyrick.php) is about a child whose mother says all those “momisms” we’ve all heard (and perhaps said to our kids) like “If you swallow that seed, a watermelon will grow out of your ear” or “ It’s as easy as falling off of a cliff.” In my book, all of those mom sayings come true, and the child needs to figure out how to break the spells.

After I read the book and as the students and I are discussing it, I ask them what is the oddest thing a parent ever said to them. I also ask what is something odd a parent might say to their child and under what circumstances the parent might say it. That also touches on the Language Arts aspect that teachers in those grade levels are always looking for.

Another creativity spark I use with my own children but have not yet fully refined it for a classroom setting is Create-a-Story. I first thought of this while driving in the car with my bored son Ethan. He knew I wrote children's books; one is even dedicated to him. This is how the activity works. One of us starts telling a story. We have no restrictions on the plot. After the first person makes up what is essentially a few paragraphs, he/she passes the narrative on to the other storyteller. That person must continue the story without contradicting anything that has happened in the story up to that point. This continues back and forth until the story reaches a conclusion, or we arrive at our destination. Because each storyteller can add only so much but wants to impact the story, the action tends to occur at a fast and furious pace.

We have come up with some quite interesting stories. Ethan, now a young adult, often centered his stories around racing cars, a favorite theme of his then and a favorite pastime of his now. My daughter Azuranna, now 12, usually centers hers around fairies and nature nymphs, and, typically, they end up with us (the stories always include one or both of us, or her and her best friend at the time, and often our dog Buki, as characters) falling into a secret hole in the earth or passing through some kind of dimensional portal in a tree or some such enchanted opening, only to end up in the magical fairy universe.

The stories my children and I create never contain raw violence or gore. I didn’t have to make that rule; my kids simply were not raised with such themes being something to glorify. Anytime I see the story going in a direction I think is inappropriate, I use my turn to steer it differently.

But the stories do become somewhat repetitive. A few days ago, Azuranna and I were telling a story and I specifically wanted her to have to create a different narrative. When she set it up for us to interact with fairies, I flipped it around to aliens coming to Earth, taking us into their space ship, different but not so different to make her lose interest. She admitted to being surprised as soon as I constructed that scenario but was thoroughly intrigued to see where this new idea would take us. In fact, we never got to the end of that story, and for the next several days, she beseeched me to finish the story.

While a child may always aim for a familiar plot, the creativity is sparked when the story takes a twist, just as in real story writing. Even when we are in her familiar, comfortable fairy world, I constantly throw in twists she did not anticipate. That keeps the entire story-creation enterprise fresh so that she always loves doing it.

This is how I plan to adapt this to a classroom setting. First, as I describe the activity to the kids, I will explicitly state that certain topics (violence, crime, gore, etc) are off limits. Not that kids stories can’t include any of that; the Goosebumps series comes to mind. But, not all kids are comfortable with such topics. Second, I will set a specified creation time for each child, probably some number of sentences. I am loathed to set a time limit, like 2 minutes per child, as I want to be able to encourage the reluctant kids who might otherwise sit and think through a time allotment without saying anything. With a sentence allotment, I can encourage that child without a ticking clock.

I plan on asking the teacher in advance which kids are outgoing and eager to talk and which are shy and rarely speak. Those shy students are the ones I most want to reach but must tread more carefully with. I would start by calling on a few of the talkative kids to get the ball rolling then sprinkle in the shier students. By planning the time carefully, I would attempt to get every child involved, although I recognize that some children are just so shy, they may never be willing to participate.

If the teacher has a large dry-erase board or large writing pad, I may have kids come up and write a few sentences. Some kids who may not be willing to speak might be willing to write a few sentences. And if the teacher agrees, before I leave I would write a few sentences on the board/pad to start a new story and let the kids work on the story as classroom time permits. Many teachers today have electronic write-on, or smart, boards that can capture whatever is written on them to a computer, so each kid could get a copy of their combined story.

Another rule of this activity is that I or the teacher can jump in at any time to add something to the story. This allows me to steer it away from repetition or a known popular kid’s story (Azuranna did that in the beginning before I explained that we wanted to create an original story). It also allows us to keep the story from going to topics that might be inappropriate in that classroom setting.

This is one of several ideas I am working on to interact with school kids using education standards of language arts. Others may become topics of future blogs.

I would love to hear your ideas on the subject. Please leave comments below or email me at wyrickwrites@gmail.com.

Special thanks to Kristin Perkins and Jay Thomas, elementary teacher friends of mine, for invaluable comments on this piece.

Killer Asteroid? Not This Time.

Sixty-six million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid smashed into what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Red-hot debris blasted into the atmosphere and fell back to Earth, causing planet-wide fires. After that, dust and soot filled the air for years, blocking most of the sunlight from the surface of the planet. The net result is that some 75% of life on Earth, including all dinosaurs, went extinct.

On September 9^th this year, asteroid 2006 QV89 will come calling. While its size, a mere 130 feet across, makes it far less dangerous than the dinosaur killer, if it hit a major city, it would certainly destroy most or all of it and kill perhaps millions of people. But you probably don’t need to worry too much. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) estimates there is only a 1 in 7,299 chance it will strike Earth. Their best estimate is that it will miss Earth by more than 4 million miles. That’s more than 16 times the Moon’s distance from us.

Artist rendering. Credit NASA

ESA keeps a tally of known asteroids that pose a collision risk with Earth. You can find it at http://neo.ssa.esa.int/risk-page. While this 1 in 7,300 risk isn’t very high, an asteroid designated 2010 RF12 poses a 1 in 16 chance of collision with Earth on September 5^th,, 2095. While that asteroid is less than 35 feet across, it will create a spectacular sight if it does enter our atmosphere, and can still cause considerable damage.

No other known asteroid poses a significant risk in the near future, so this upcoming near-miss will be our closest dance with asteroid destruction for a while.

Until the next asteroid with a high collision risk is discovered.

On or about the first Tuesday of each month, I write an astronomy-related column piece for the Oklahoman newspaper. On the following day, I post that same column to my blog page. This is reprinted by permission from the Oklahoman and www.newsok.com.