Asteroid Day Live returned to Luxembourg on Thursday with a packed line-up of fascinating talks on the latest in asteroid exploration and space technology. Silicon Luxembourg sums it up in five takeaways.
Asteroids contain the recipe for our solar system
What if someone baked the most fantastic cake, but you lost the recipe? This is how director of research at Patrick Michel and at France’s national research centre the CNRS, explained the importance of asteroids for understanding the origins of our solar system. “The solar system is a big cake that we don’t know the recipe for and we don’t know these original ingredients,” he said, adding: “Planets are the same. They are big cakes from which we try to understand how they form.”
Asteroids are what was left over from the process of the formation of our solar system. By analysing their composition and structure, scientists can work out their age and develop theories about the origins of the universe.
Not all asteroids on earth are found in labs or museums
In February 2021, residents of the Gloucestershire village of Winchcombe were invited to go on a treasure hunt to recover fragments of a meteorite that was observed entering the Earth’s atmosphere. It was found it be a 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite originating from an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiters and marked the first meteorite recovered in Britain since 1991.
Members of the public can see more asteroids and fragments of meteorites at Luxembourg natural history museum, the MNHM, at a special exhibition opening in October 2022.
We have a lot of eyes on the skies
More important than just finding a new asteroid, is mapping their trajectory said American astronaut Ed Lu. The B612 Asteroid Institute, of which Lu is executive director, has developed the Asteroid Discovery, Analysis, and Mapping (ADAM) platform to analyse and understand asteroid data sets. ADAM uses Google Compute Engine to perform precision cloud-based asteroid orbit propagations, orbit determination, targeted deflections, Monte Carlo impact probability calculations, and orbit visualizations. The goal is to create a cloud-based astrodynamics platform available to the scientific community.
And if members of the non-scientific community want to know what is the risk of an asteroid hitting Earth, a large amount of data, including the ESA “Risk List” is publicly available. Around 4% of newly discovered asteroids end up on this list
The age of sail is coming back
Just as Columbus and his contemporaries used ships with sails to discover new lands, solar sails are an efficient means of space travel. NEA Scout, a cube satellite (the size of two loaves of bread) asteroid mission launching in 2022, will employ a solar sail as a means of propulsion. The 86-metre-square sail resembles a mirror and essentially runs on light. The target is 2020 GE, a near-Earth asteroid that is less than 18 metres in size. The asteroid will be studied for its size, shape, rotation and surface properties.
According to Pete Worden, executive director of Breakthrough Starshot and chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation said: “the age of sail is coming back. NASA has plans for solar-powered ships,” he said.
We’re going asteroid hunting
NASA’s double asteroid redirection test, Dart, was launched in November last year. And on 26 September, it will shoot onto Dimorphos, the small moon of the binary Didymos asteroid system.
Patrick Michel, the principal investigator for the HERA mission with ESA, will “go on to the crime scene to observe the outcome of the impact of years of nature and also measure all the characteristics of the target.” The purpose of this exercise is to test whether current asteroid deflection techniques are mature and validate impact models in a space scenario, but also to bring back samples from the meteorite.
