Posts Tagged ‘Lagrange’

Is an Earth Trojan Asteroid the Logical Target for the “Flexible Path”?

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011
Trojan Asteroid 2010 TK7
Asteroid 2010 TK7 is circled in green.
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA
Scientists using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the first Trojan Asteroid in Earth orbit. Trojans orbit at a location in front of or behind a planet known as a Lagrange Point.

A video of the asteroid and its orbit at the Lagrange point can be found here.

Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada is the lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature.

Connors notes that:

These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see. But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth’s surface.

TK7 is roughly 300 meters in diameter and traces a complex motion around SEL-4 (Sun Earth Lagrange point 4). The asteroid’s orbit is stable for at least the next 100 years and is currently about 80 million kilometers from the Earth. In that time, it is expected to come no closer that 24 million kilometers.

The obvious question is whether this is the logical destination for NASA’s Flexible Path manned asteroid mission? The Lagrange 4 point (SEL-4) is a logical way station on the Solar System exploration highway. Other NEO asteroids that have been identified as possible targets are few and much more difficult to reach and return than an asteroid located directly at SEL-4 would be. An asteroid located there could well be the target of opportunity that opens manned exploration of the Solar System in an “easy” mode. Unfortunately, Asteroid 2010 TK7 would not serve as such a target because it travels in an eccentric orbit around SEL-4 so far above and below the plane of Earth’s orbit that it would require very large amounts of fuel to reach.

NEOWISE is the program for searching the WISE database for Near Earth Objects (NEO), as well as other asteroids in the Solar System.The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.

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Posted in Asteroid, Astronauts, Astronomy, Event, NASA, Space, Space Settlement | 1 Comment »

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe

Saturday, October 9th, 2010

WMAP
Completed Microwave Map of the Universe
Image Credit: NASA

Scientists announced this week that the mission of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) has been completed. The last set of observations were downloaded on 20 August 2010, and researchers are compiling the final results. The satellite was placed in a permanent parking orbit around the sun on 8 September 2010.

WMAP was launched on 30 June 2001 and placed into an orbit around SEL-2, the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point. SEL-2 lies 1,500,000 kilometers beyond the Earth on a line from the Sun to the Earth. WMAP was the first spacecraft to occupy this location. SEL-2 is extremely cold, shaded from the Sun’s activity by the Earth’s shadow and ideal as an astronomical location in space. In 2009, the Herschel Space Observatory and Planck space observatory took up residence at SEL-2. They will be joined in 2014 or 2015 by the James Webb Space Telescope.

First detected in 1964, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation (television “snow” - before cable), is the remnants of the extremely hot radiation from the big-bang, now cooled to almost absolute zero after 13.73 billions years of the expansion of the universe. It is a pattern frozen in place when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old.

WMAP COBE was the successor to NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which was launched on 18 November 1989 and produced the first map of the microwave radiation. Note the great increase in resolution between the COBE map at the right, and the WMAP result above.

The Planck observatory is currently making high resolution measurements of both the total intensity and polarization of the primordial CMB anisotropies that were first observed by COBE and WMAP.

The observations made by WMAP are the most accurate to date and have allowed scientists to rule out several “inflation” models about what happened in the first trillionths of a second during the birth of the cosmos, while supplying support for several other models:

  • The age of the universe is 13.73 billion years old to within 1% (0.12 billion years)
  • Ordinary matter (atoms) makes up only 4.6% of the universe (to within 0.1%)
  • Dark matter (not made up of atoms) makes up 23.3% (to within 1.3%)
  • Dark energy makes up 72.1% of the universe (to within 1.5%)

Dark energy is the force driving the galaxies in the universe apart at an ever increasing rate. At some point in the future, inhabitants of the Milky Way will not be able to see any other objects in the sky. These entities will conclude that they are at the center of the universe, and will have no information about the big bang and the creation of the cosmos as we know it today.

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Posted in Astronomy, Dave Fischer, NASA, Space | No Comments »