Researcher Finds Better Odds Asteroid Will Strike Mars (1/6/2008)

An unnamed piece of space junk the size of a small apartment building is streaking toward Mars at nearly 30,000 miles an hour. To imagine what the impact would be if the two crashed, try conjuring the force of a 3-megaton nuclear blast.

NASA's Near Earth Object Program put the odds of a collision between asteroid 2007 WD5 and the red planet at 1-in-28 as of Jan. 2, thanks to Dr. Andy Puckett, a Post-Doc at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA). Some two weeks earlier, before Puckett weighed in, the odds were nearly three times as remote.

Should the 160-foot-long asteroid smash into Mars, the impact will come January 30 at 1:56 a.m. AST, give or take a few minutes, according to scientists. The explosion would be tremendous; the blast would scoop out a crater a half-mile wide and throw huge volumes of dust into the thin Martian atmosphere.

Puckett and other scientists are praying for a violent event. "I hope it does happen," says Puckett, a researcher at UAA who refined WD5's orbit so that its odds of a crash with Mars were found to be greater than first thought. Puckett located the asteroid's positions in the heavens at particular moments in time by analyzing data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Scientists want the asteroid to strike Mars because the resulting cavity would be the first freshly made crater in the Solar System ever to be studied. Research instruments already inhabit the planet - two Rovers and several orbiting satellites, none of which is in danger of being struck by the asteroid - and they could collect masses of data, including information on whether Mars contains subsurface water.

"The impact would make a giant hole and allow us to see below the surface," said Dr. Travis Rector, an assistant professor in UAA's Department of Physics and Astronomy. "It would be a total bonanza."

While Mars will be up at 2 a.m. on Jan. 30, Alaskans are not likely to see the impact with the naked eye. "I seriously doubt that Mars's brightness would appear to change," Rector said.

There's another good reason to hope asteroid 2007 WD5 has an explosive rendezvous with Mars. Earthlings need a wake-up call, said Puckett. Our solar system is infested with asteroids, comets and other objects. It's only a matter of time before one or more are headed our way with odds of striking Earth at greater than 1-in-28. In fact, this particular asteroid passed by Earth closely (in astronomical terms), within 5 million miles, on Nov. 1, according to NASA. Yet no one knew about it until Nov. 20 when it already was here and gone.

A spectacular planetary collision, said Puckett, "lets people know, including Congress, that 'Hey guys, this is a serious threat.'"

Besides being a Martian invader in reverse, Asteroid WD5 is also a space traveler with great timing. It arrives at the right moment for the Astronomy program at UAA.

Rector recently won a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new physics and astronomy curriculum that can be used nationwide, and one of his first acts was to hire Puckett because of Puckett's expertise with the Kuiper Belt, a region in the outer Solar System rife with comets, asteroids and other cosmic renegades.

Puckett also studies what are known as near-Earth objects like the present visitor. Already on tap for the coming Spring Semester at UAA, among several goals, was a Puckett-developed laboratory project in the calculation of asteroid orbits.

"Students will do the work, they'll make the observations," said Rector. "This is all new, and the timing of the potential Mars impact couldn't be better."

Puckett said he would have jumped at the chance to refine the asteroid's orbit even had he not been at UAA. "But I knew this was exactly the type of object we're looking for," he said. "It was just serendipitous."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the University of Alaska Anchorage

Comments:

Leave a Reply: