A Big Bang for 2008?

by Clifford Johnson     Department: Space

Well, that possible collision of an asteroid into Mars that I blogged about on Asymptotia a short while ago has become  a bit more probable. After incorporating more data about the trajectory of the 50 metre wide lump, the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has upgraded the collision probability from  a 1 in 75 chance to a 1 in 25 chance. It would be rather exciting if it did happen, and (besides a fun-filled bang) we might learn quite a bit about similar events here in Earth, future and past (such as the famous 1908 Tunguska event), and of course quite a bit about the composition of Mars' surface crust. This is all due to take place on Jan 30th, at roughly 10:56 GMT (2:56 a.m. PST).

For more on this, see the Associated Press story by Alicia Chang  here, and listen to the NPR interview of Don Yeomans by Ira Flatow about the matter here. In the interview, Yeomans does a good job of helping you appreciate the collective efforts of all the teams involved in finding and tracking the object, and more on how it is all done. (The new data that helped narrow down the trajectory was from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for example, which archived  images of the relevant part of the sky for a completely different piece of science - cataloging galaxies in order to understand the large scale structure of the universe. Recent Ph.D., Andy Puckett was the one who uncovered this and used it to make the refinement.)  Of course, you can also get information on the NASA/JPL press release page here, and the NEO page is here.

Keep an eye out everywhere for updates on this - just in case!

-cvj

Tags: asteroid, mars, space