Tag Archives: asteroids

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Cold War treaties aren’t sufficient for the era of asteroid mining

Why did I, a physics/astronomy journalist, write about asteroids for a deep-sea mining trade magazine? Read on! Oh yes, and pledge to my book of science comics with Maki Naro, Who Owns an Asteroid?

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The World Is Not Ready for Asteroid Mining, But It Needs To Be

For Deep Sea Mining Observer:

Nothing is less “deep sea” than an asteroid, yet parallels exist between these two domains, particularly when it comes to resource extraction. Asteroids are debris left over from the formation of the Solar System roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Due to our shared origin, Earth and asteroids contain the same basic materials: water, carbon compounds,  metals, and so forth. The “metals and so forth” part has drawn the interest of nations and private companies, since many asteroids are potentially rich in gold, platinum, and rare-earth elements. Astronomers have identified 957,798 asteroids as of December 2019, of which about 10,000 are known to orbit close enough to our planet to be classified as near-Earth objects — with some reachable by spacecraft.

With no biosphere, ecosystem services, or local stakeholders, extracting materials from asteroids carries few of the environmental concerns present in terrestrial or ocean mining on Earth.

Both the deep ocean and outer space are governed by international law, with much of said law constructed during the Cold War. Interested parties often bring a certain Wild West mentality to resource extraction in both instances. However, space law lags behind terrestrial laws on a number of fronts, and recent moves by individual nations and companies should be seen as a wake-up call.

[read the rest at DSM Observer…]

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Asteroids, Mars, and a vision for space beyond colonialism

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Who owns an asteroid?

Celestial bodies like Bennu could help us tell Earth’s origin story. Or they could be strip-mined for resources

Panel from “Who Owns an Asteroid?” with words by me and art by Maki Naro. Click for the whole comic.

Discussions around space travel are saturated in colonialist language and narratives, from “space colonies” on Mars to multiple proposals for mining asteroids. These concepts are often treated as inevitable, with conversations about when and how, rather than if we should do any of this in the first place. In The Nib, artist extraordinaire Maki Naro and I look at how colonialist attitudes have colored our dialog on asteroids and Mars, with a focus on the ethical and — dare we say — the spiritual component of conservation on other worlds.

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Strange asteroid may have been born in another star system

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And if I can be shameless: Forbes pays according to traffic, so the more of you who share and visit and read my stuff, the better they pay me. Ahem.

Strange Asteroid May Be A Permanent Alien Guest

strange asteroid 2015 BZ509

The strange asteroid 2015 BZ509 (circled), which may have been born orbiting another star before getting kicked out and joining our Solar System. [Credit: C. Veillet/LBTO]

For Forbes:

Last fall, an asteroid we named ʻOumuamua passed through the Solar System. Its visit marked the first time we’ve identified an object inside the Solar System that definitely came from outside. However, a new study argues that we might have a more permanent interstellar guest: a weird asteroid called 2015 BZ509.

Thousands of asteroids swarm around Jupiter’s orbit, but they all orbit the same direction as the giant planet except 2015 BZ509. This weirdo orbits the opposite direction — “retrograde” in technical terms — at a highly tilted angle. Fathi Namouni and Helena Morais performed a computer simulation which demonstrates that 2015 BZ509 could stay in its orbit for billions of years, but it’s unlikely it formed there when the rest of the Solar System was born. Instead, the authors argue, it probably originated outside the Solar System and drifted in, where it was captured by gravity.

[Read the rest at Forbes…]

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The first known interstellar visitor to the Solar System

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Cosmic Driftwood

What a floating rock can tell us about life in the rest of the universe

Panel from “Cosmic Driftwood”. [Credit: Maki Naro (art) and moi (words)]

Last October, we had the first known interstellar visitor to the Solar System: an asteroid named ʻOumuamua. In our latest comic for The Nib, Maki Naro and I explain how we know the building-sized rock isn’t from around here, what we know about it, and what it might tell us about life elsewhere in the galaxy.

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There (to an asteroid) and back again: a robot’s journey

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This Thursday, the OSIRIS-REx robotic probe will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, destined for asteroid Bennu. I can’t ride with the probe, but I’m doing the next best thing: going to Florida to watch the launch, alongside scientists involved in the project. Here’s a preview, written for New Scientist:

NASA probe about to leave for asteroid Bennu and bring bits home

For New Scientist:

Bennu or bust. On 8 September, the OSIRIS-REx probe will leave Earth for the asteroid Bennu, and will return with souvenirs: up to 2 kilograms of material from its surface.

OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) is the latest in a string of sample return missions, following the Stardust mission to the comet Wild 2 and the Hayabusa mission to asteroid Itokawa. Both of those missions hit hurdles, and neither brought more than a few grains of material back to Earth.

OSIRIS-Rex will pioneer a new and ambitious technique for gathering samples: a robotic arm equipped with a vacuum cleaner. [Read the rest at The New Scientist…]

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Don’t pull up stakes for the asteroid-mining gold rush

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Is Space Becoming a Gold Mine?

A new law grants private companies ownership over the materials they extract from asteroids or the Moon. But don’t call it a gold rush just yet

For The Daily Beast:

Asteroids are remnants of the Solar System’s youth. When the planets were forming more than 4.5 billion years ago, gas and dust molecules clung together to form larger objects, which in turn collided and stuck together to make yet bigger things. At the end of the process, we were left with the big planets, moons, and a huge number of smaller bodies which contain the raw chemicals we see on Earth.

Some asteroids could contain significant amounts of rare metals such as platinum, rare-earth elements, and other materials. Even water is a valuable resource in space, since it is useful as fuel (broken into hydrogen and oxygen components) and necessary for astronauts, but very heavy and therefore expensive to carry into space.

Now, President Barack Obama signed a bill into law granting private companies ownership over materials they extract from asteroids or the Moon. The bill also extends the period of time private corporations can develop spacecraft without direct government oversight, to help speed the process of getting more rockets into space.

But don’t pull up stakes for the asteroid-mining gold rush just yet. [Read the rest at The Daily Beast…]

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Bathing asteroids with nuclear weapons

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A gentle nudge with a nuke: deflecting Earth-bound asteroids

From Ars Technica:

In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the event sent more than a thousand people to the hospital, mostly from flying glass from shattered windows. The Chelyabinsk meteor was a relatively small chunk of space rock—asteroid researchers think it was probably about 20 meters (66 feet) across—but exploding over a city made it a noteworthy event. It’s probable many similar asteroids hit Earth on a regular basis, but most don’t happen to fly over metropolitan areas; they fall into the ocean or over lightly populated regions.

However, Earth has played target in the cosmic darts tournament before. Meteor Crater in Arizona, the Tunguska impact in Siberia in 1908, and most famously the Chicxulub asteroid in Mexico (which played a part in the extinction of the dinosaurs) are just three of many known examples. That’s why many people are looking at viable options for planetary defense: destroying or turning asteroids aside before they can hit Earth. And planetary defense is one reason the United States’ National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) has given for not destroying some of its surplus nuclear warheads. [Read the rest at Ars Technica…]

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A space robot arrives at a new world: Dawn at Ceres

The asteroid dwarf planet Ceres, in a view showing the intriguing two bright spots. [Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA ]

The asteroid dwarf planet Ceres, in a view showing the intriguing two bright spots. [Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA ]

Sunday is my birthday, and NASA kindly decided to give me a whole asteroid. I got to write about it for The Daily Beast.

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Made It to Dwarf Planet Ceres

From The Daily Beast:

When I was young, I obsessively read through a National Geographic science book called Our Universe, a good overview of current astronomy and especially the Solar System. Voyager 2 was cutting edge at the time, which gives you a hint of when this was. One chapter was devoted to asteroids, the small rocky bodies scattered throughout the inner Solar System and especially the region between Mars and Jupiter. At that time, we didn’t have clear photos of any of them, so the book had paintings of Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and several asteroids. My mental image of Ceres for more than 30 years has been that artist’s impression: a perfectly spherical, heavily cratered object, colored a light gray.

I mention this because for the first time in history, we now have real photos of Ceres, thanks to NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Dawn entered orbit around Ceres today, providing us with our first close-up views during its approach. [Read more at The Daily Beast…]

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Artist's impression of the ringed asteroid Chariklo. While the asteroid is too small and distant to image directly, astronomers found two narrow rings around it — making it the smallest known object with a ring system. [Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)]

Artist’s impression of the ringed asteroid Chariklo. While the asteroid is too small and distant to image directly, astronomers found two narrow rings around it — making it the smallest known object with a ring system. [Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/M. Kornmesser/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)]

Saturn’s magnificent rings have been known since Galileo observed the planet’s “ears” in his telescope. In the last few decades, researchers found rings (albeit less shiny ones) around the other giant planets — Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. And now the small asteroid Chariklo has joined the ring cycle: observations revealed it has two narrow rings, probably composed of water ice. It’s an intriguing discovery, since nothing else we’ve found at intermediate sizes has rings, leading to questions of how they form, how stable they may be, and whether there might be other beringed objects out there.

Beyond size, another challenge is Chariklo’s location between Saturn and Uranus. It orbits in a long ellipse, ranging from 13 to nearly 19 times farther from the Sun than Earth. This position, along with its composition of rock and ice, marks Chariklo as a “centaur.” Just like mythological centaurs are half human and half horse, astronomical centaurs combine features of asteroids and comets. (Centaurs would grow comet-like tails if they fell closer toward the Sun.) Tens of thousands of centaurs may lurk among the giant planets, though most of those are much smaller than Chariklo, the largest known centaur. [Read more…]

All the single centaurs

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Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the Solar System, and recent measurements by the Dawn mission showed that it’s actually a protoplanet: a piece of planet-like material left over from the early days of our Solar System. However, Dawn is significantly non-spherical and very battered. Most notably, it has two huge overlapping craters near its south pole, marking impacts that nearly shattered the asteroid, and which raised a mountain higher than any other in the Solar System. Now, a computer simulation may have showed how Vesta came to be the fascinating, scarred, wonderful object we see today.

As with other Solar System bodies, Vesta bears the scars of its history. The most substantial of these scars are the two large impact basins, Veneneia and Rheasilvia. (Both craters were named for virgins who served the goddess Vesta in Roman mythology—the vestals.) Rheasilvia formed about 1 billion years ago and is larger. Veneneia is smaller and formed at least 2 billion years ago; its presence was partly obscured by the later impact. Meteorites from Vesta, possibly ejected by the impacts forming Rheasilvia and Veneneia, have been found on Earth. [Read more….]

Kaboom! A simulation shows how impacts shaped and nearly destroyed Vesta