Asteroid

With a little luck, scientists and engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will help to send a NASA spacecraft to land on an asteroid or on Venus late in this decade. The two proposed interplanetary missions with Goddard connections were among three selected Monday to receive $3.3 million each for further cost and feasibility study under NASA's New Frontiers program. Only one will be funded after a final cut later this year. The winning mission would have to launch by 2018, and cost less than $650 million.

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will get a $128 million slice of a new mission to grab a sample from an asteroid and return it to Earth in 2023. NASA selected the $800 million OSIRIS-Rex mission for funding Wednesday, passing over competing proposals to send spacecraft to Venus and the moon. The work will be led by Michael J. Drake at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and managed by Goddard. Engineers at the space center will also build one of its instruments.

Soon after Valentine's Day in 1996, an asteroid named for the Greek god of love will become the target of a $125 million arrow shot into space by scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel.The interplanetary mission, dubbed Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), will attempt to place a satellite into orbit around the asteroid Eros by December 1998. It is one of NASA's "Discovery" series of "quicker and cheaper" space science missions.Eros is a chunk of rock about 22 miles long, circling the sun in a path that crosses the orbits of both Earth and Mars.

With a little luck, scientists and engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will help to send a NASA spacecraft to land on an asteroid or on Venus late in this decade. The two proposed interplanetary missions with Goddard connections were among three selected Monday to receive $3.3 million each for further cost and feasibility study under NASA's New Frontiers program. Only one will be funded after a final cut later this year. The winning mission would have to launch by 2018, and cost less than $650 million.

Here's something to worry about: A small asteroid -- a chunk of space debris perhaps a half-mile in diameter -- is on a collision course with Earth. A strike by a body that size could explode with the force of 25,000 hydrogen bombs, creating massive tidal waves and flinging enough dust into the atmosphere to block out sunlight for months. Civilization would collapse. Anyone who survived the initial impact would shortly die of starvation or exposure. Eventually all traces of human life would be extinguished from the planet.

In the 1998 movie Armageddon, audiences thrilled as Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi and Ben Affleck scrambled to save life on Earth from destruction by an asteroid - and the vast majority left the theater safely confident that such a far-fetched threat could not possibly reflect reality. They should not have been so sure. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that on March 2, asteroid 2009 DD45 came within about 48,000 miles of Earth. In astronomical terms, that's way too close for comfort.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The chance that the Earth will be struck by a milewide asteroid in the next year is greater than the chance that any given person will be struck by lightning -- about 1 in a million. But since an asteroid that size could destroy half the planet's population, some NASA scientists say it's a statistic worth worrying about."We know that the Earth exists in a swarm of comets and asteroids," David Morrison, chief of the Space Science Division at NASA's Ames Research Center here, said last week.

If you're reading this Tuesday morning (or any time thereafter), then scientists were right: An asteroid the size of a city block did not crash into the Earth as we slept. OK, there was never any danger of that. Asteroid 2007 TU24 swept by the planet at 3:33 a.m. EST at a safe distance of 334,000 miles - roughly one-and-a-half times the distance from Earth to the moon. But it was the closest an asteroid this size has come since 1985, and the closest one we know about until 2027. Had Earth been in the bulls-eye, TU24 would not have burned up harmlessly.

Lord Baltimore's name has now been flung far beyond his namesake city on the Chesapeake Bay, deep into the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.A 10-mile-wide rock orbiting some 260 million miles from the sun has been dubbed Asteroid Baltimore by the International Astronomical Union. The naming is in celebration of the bicentennials of the city and the Maryland Academy of Sciences.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke will get a "deed" to the asteroid as part of this week's opening of an exhibit at the Maryland Science Center.

Contact with the Maryland-built NEAR spacecraft was lost late yesterday. The problem began shortly after the start of what was to have been a 20-minute rocket burn intended to speed NEAR toward a Jan. 10 rendezvous with the asteroid Eros."

With a little luck, scientists and engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will help to send a NASA spacecraft to land on an asteroid or on Venus late in this decade. The two proposed interplanetary missions with Goddard connections were among three selected Monday to receive $3.3 million each for further cost and feasibility study under NASA's New Frontiers program. Only one will be funded after a final cut later this year. The winning mission would have to launch by 2018, and cost less than $650 million.

Warmongering adds to economic woes I appreciate that The Baltimore Sun has again placed the quagmire in Afghanistan on the front page, where it belongs ("Afghan bombings expected to worsen," April 5). As someone who has been protesting the invasion of that desperately poor country since 2001, I believe the war should always be on the front page, as misbegotten military adventures mean death and destruction for all sides. And to be frank, it is utter madness, especially as we face economic devastation, to expend billions of tax dollars funding wars and the occupation of the Palestinian people.

In the 1998 movie Armageddon, audiences thrilled as Bruce Willis, Steve Buscemi and Ben Affleck scrambled to save life on Earth from destruction by an asteroid - and the vast majority left the theater safely confident that such a far-fetched threat could not possibly reflect reality. They should not have been so sure. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that on March 2, asteroid 2009 DD45 came within about 48,000 miles of Earth. In astronomical terms, that's way too close for comfort.

An asteroid hurtles toward Earth, threatening devastation. A team of attractive young scientists and engineers launches a rocket that crashes into the asteroid and knocks it off course - just in the nick of time. But wait. The crash pushes the giant space rock toward a "keyhole" in space: a tiny window that guarantees that the asteroid will come back and obliterate some hapless city in the future. What to do? A scruffy grad student raises his hand. How about a "gravity tractor" to tow it off course?

If you're reading this Tuesday morning (or any time thereafter), then scientists were right: An asteroid the size of a city block did not crash into the Earth as we slept. OK, there was never any danger of that. Asteroid 2007 TU24 swept by the planet at 3:33 a.m. EST at a safe distance of 334,000 miles - roughly one-and-a-half times the distance from Earth to the moon. But it was the closest an asteroid this size has come since 1985, and the closest one we know about until 2027. Had Earth been in the bulls-eye, TU24 would not have burned up harmlessly.

Tonight, or more likely tomorrow night if skies clear, we might get a glimpse of what could be the year's best meteor shower. The Geminids can whip up 120 meteors per hour under dark skies. The crescent moon sets by 9 p.m. or so, making skies darker. Bright and medium-speed "shooting stars" will seem to spring from the constellation Gemini, rising in the east after dinner. They're dust from a battered asteroid, 3200 Phaethon, which flew by Monday.

A so-called "mystery" object heading for a close encounter with Earth has turned out to be not so mysterious after all: Astronomers say it is a plain old asteroid, about the size of a delivery truck, one of many that buzz past the planet every couple of days.After the object was first spotted by telescope Nov. 6 by a University of Arizona scientist, astronomers speculated that it might be a piece of a 20-year-old Apollo moon rocket or a scrap from a cloak-and-dagger space launch.But Diane Ainsworth, a spokeswoman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

IT WAS billed as a Valentine's Day affair, a love connection. A space satellite hooking up with a celestial body near Mars on Monday, Feb. 14. Indeed, love abounded when the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) successfully orbited the asteroid Eros, named for the Greek god of love. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration needed a mission it could love after some recent failures near the Red Planet. The $165 million Mars Polar Lander disappeared as it approached the planet in early December.

The asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is often credited with prompting the rise of the mammals we see today - including primates like us. But a new study says the effects of the dinosaurs' demise have been greatly exaggerated. Modern-day mammals, researchers say, displayed an initial burst of evolutionary diversity up to 100 million years ago - while the dinosaurs were still roaming prehistoric swamps.

NASA and the Air Force are studying ways to ward off a medium-sized asteroid that will streak within 18,000 miles of Earth in 2029 and has an extremely slight chance of crashing into our planet in 2036. Ideas discussed this week at a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington include a "gravity tug" or "space tractor" that would hover near the space rock and tow it into a safe orbit. Other possibilities include a head-on collision with an unmanned spaceship or a nuclear explosion. In the past eight years, 754 asteroids bigger than 1 kilometer (about six-tenths of a mile, or 3,280 feet)