asteroids
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What The Sky Would Look Like If You Could See All The Asteroids
Here’s a really cool visualisation from astronomer Scott Manley that shows what our sky might look like if we could actually see all the asteroids. Asteroids aren’t visible to the naked eye because they’re too small to register, but Manley was able to reveal the known asteroids and speed them up to exaggerate how they…
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Welcome To Asteroid War Games, Where Scientists Practice Saving Earth
There’s a 1200-foot asteroid headed straight for the Earth. You’ve got five days to come up with a plan, or go the way of the dinosaurs. This isn’t the script for the Day After Tomorrow sequel — it’s the scenario being war-gamed by a roomful of PhDs as we speak.
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NASA Asteroid Defence System Is A Failure, Says Audit
NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has alerted of the awful state of the asteroid defence system, a program mandated by US Congress in 2005 to detect and track at least 90 per cent near-Earth objects greater than 140m in diameter by 2020. This is bad news.
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Japan’s Decade-Long Mission To Mine An Asteroid
1999 JU3: It doesn’t sound like a very noteworthy name. It’s just one of more than 5,000 Apollo-class asteroids. But 1999 JU3 could become a household name if Japan succeeds in mining it — a mission that JAXA has struggled with for decades, often disastrously. And on Sunday, it revealed the probe that could redeem…