At around 0246 UT (about two hours and twenty minutes from now), the Earth will be hit by an asteroid. 2008 TC3 was discovered last night by Richard Kowalski and a team at Mt. Lemmon Observatory in Arizona, and further observations pinned down its orbit enough that calculations can be made that predict the asteroid will enter the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere near Sudan.
But don’t worry! This asteroid is between 2 and 5 meters in diameter. Asteroids this size enter the Earth’s atmosphere all the time at a rate of a few per year. This is the first time one’s been spotted before it enters the atmosphere though.
If you want to pretend you’re on 2008 TC3 as it barrels into the Earth, check out this awesome animation.
These two videos are making their way around the intertubes today, but they’re too good not to share. They’re from the Deep Impact spacecraft (now renamed EPOXI), and show something rather magical:
Visit the Bad Astronomy Blog for a much better write-up than I could ever do.
SCUBA-2, being a revolutionary instrument and all, is still in the process of being commissioned at JCMT. It shipped with “engineering-grade” arrays, which are of lower quality than “science-grade” arrays. They have more dead pixels and the remaining pixels are noisier than the requested spec. They can still be used for commissioning, as they can detect photons, only not well enough to do proper science with.
Until June 9, when NIST researchers discovered that a vial of plutonium was cracked and some particles spilled from the vial. Understandably this has lead to the closure of the lab while cleanup and investigations are done. Unfortunately this lab had either parts of the arrays or the full arrays in it. They’re not expecting to get into the lab until August, when we find out if the radiation event caused any damage to the sensitive SCUBA-2 array electronics.
But full operation SCUBA-2 has just been pushed back again. How much is still uncertain, but a month is probably the lower limit.
*One of the more serious problems to date came when one of the groups was preparing the arrays for shipping and accidentally dropped a crate on or tightened a lid on one of them, crushing one of the corners. Whoops.
This week’s Weekly Science Video comes courtesy NASA. This is the second in a series produced to educate people about GLAST, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, which is due to launch on June 5.
