Category: Asteroids

Image credit: NASA

As potentially killer asteroids are announced on an almost yearly basis, the public is started to get a little jaded about the risks humanity faces. How can governments and space agencies confront a threat that can only be a “maybe” until it’s too late to do anything about it? Here’s my opinion.

Well, you can all breath a sigh of relief, 2003 qq47 isn’t going to smash into Earth on March 21, 2014 and cause widespread death and destruction. But then, if you’ve been a regular follower of space news, you’re probably not really surprised. Astronomers release a warning almost every year that a space rock has some outside chance of striking the Earth, and then revise their estimates shortly afterwards thanks to more observations.

The first big rock to freak out the public was Asteroid 1997 XF11; it was supposed to strike the Earth in October 26, 2028. Even though the original threat was still remote, the mass media picked up on this. There were full-page articles in major newspapers, the cover of magazines, and on the evening news. Astronomers quickly followed up the story with a retraction. Not only would XF11 miss the Earth, it would miss by almost a million kilometres, or 2.5 times further than the Moon.

New reports of killer asteroids have come out in the following years, with wiser astronomers being a little more conservative in their predictions. With QQ47, the first stories pegged the chances of a strike at 1 in 909,000; not much higher than the background risk that the Earth faces every year from getting hit by an asteroid. The risk has since been downgraded.

As automated asteroid searches continue to search the sky, potential planet smashers are going to be spotted quite regularly. Astronomers will provide conservative calculations, and a jaded public will treat each announcement with even more skepticism. When the 37th potential killer asteroid is announced, it’ll make little more than a blip in the general media – that’s understandable.

The unspoken goal for finding asteroids is to prevent one of them from ever striking the Earth and causing damage. In theory, the sooner you find a killer asteroid, the longer you have to adjust its orbit and save the Earth from destruction. If a collision is only a couple of months away, there’s little to do but prepare for the worst. But if it’s years or even decades away, spacecraft could be launched to nudge the asteroid into a less hazardous trajectory.

Astronomers are going to keep a watchful eye on the sky, to alert governments and the public to any future risks. But the problem is that astronomers deal in probabilities. They won’t say a certain asteroid WILL hit the Earth (like in Armageddon); instead they’ll say that it can hit the Earth.

That it may hit the Earth.

Will governments and space agencies be decisive enough to spend billions of dollars changing an asteroid’s orbit when they aren’t sure it’s even necessary. The longer you wait, the better the calculations become, but the less time you have to defend against it. With more data, astronomers will likely be tracking dozens of potential Earth-crossers with varying risks and dates that they’ll strike our planet. How do we decide which asteroids need to be moved and which can wait?

I don’t think we’re ever going to have a clear-cut challenge that will unite humanity against a common threat. If we did, it would probably only be months away and there’d be little we could do about it. Just take a look at global warming. Even though the evidence seems to be saying that humans have warmed the planet a degree in the last century, the worldwide response is denial and procrastination.

So what’s the solution? I honestly don’t know if governments and space agencies can really get organized and decisive around such a nebulous threat (the threat is real, though, with the potential for unlimited damage). Investing in basic research is probably the best solution; better funding for observatories to discover and map asteroid trajectories; new propulsion systems that could help push an asteroid out of the way. Maybe if engineers deliver better solutions, it will help procrastinating governments take action at the last minute.

Image credit: Keck

A team of astronomers have used the 10-metre Keck II telescope to create a series of images that show asteroid (511) Davida from every angle. The images of the 320 km asteroid were taken in late December, 2002 using the Keck’s adaptive optics system – a special technology that allows the telescope to compensate for distortion caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. The observations are so precise that features as small as 46 km can be seen on the surface of the asteroid.

A team of scientists from the W.M. Keck Observatory and several other research institutions have made the first full-rotational, ground-based observations of asteroid (511) Davida, a large, main-belt asteroid that measures 320 km (200 miles) in diameter. These observations are among the first high-resolution, ground-based pictures of large asteroids, made possible only through the use of adaptive optics on large telescopes. This research will help improve understanding of how asteroids were formed and provide information about their compositions and structures. Because the asteroids were formed and shaped by collisions, a process that also affected the Earth, Moon, and planets, these studies will also help astronomers understand the history and evolution of the solar system.

” Asteroid Davida was discovered 100 years ago, but this is the first time anyone has been able to see this level of detail on this object,” said Dr. Al Conrad, scientist at the W.M. Keck Observatory. “With adaptive optics, we’re finally able to transform asteroids like Davida from a single, faint point-source into an object of true geological study.”

Ground-based observations of large, main-belt asteroids are made possible only through a powerful astronomical technique called adaptive optics, which removes the blurring caused by Earth’s atmosphere. Without adaptive optics, critical surface information and details about the asteroid’s shape are lost. The techniques used at the W.M. Keck Observatory allow astronomers to measure the distortion of light caused by the atmosphere and rapidly make corrections, restoring the light to near-perfect quality. Such corrections are most easily made to infrared light. In many cases, infrared observations made with Keck adaptive optics are better than those obtained with space-based telescopes.

The observations of asteroid (511) Davida were made with the 10-meter (400-inch) Keck II telescope on December 26, 2002. Images were taken over a full rotation period of about 5.1 hours, just a few days before its closest approach to Earth. At that time, Davida’s angular diameter was less than one-ten-thousandth of a degree, about the size of a quarter as seen from a distance of 18 kilometers (11 miles). The high angular resolution allowed astronomers to see surface details as small as 46 kilometers (30 miles), about the size of the San Francisco Bay area. The next time Davida comes this close to Earth will be in the year 2030.

At the time of the observations, Davida?s north pole faced Earth. While scientists could see the asteroid spinning, only the northern hemisphere was visible. Yet the profile of the asteroid is far from circular: At least two flat facets can be seen on its surface. Although scientists knew previously from light variations that Davida must have an oblong shape, details of that shape were not available until now. Initial evaluation of the images reveal some dark features, and scientists are still working to understand to what extent these are surface markings, topographical features, or artifacts of the image processing.

” Adaptive optics on large telescopes is allowing us to make detailed studies from the ground that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive,” said Dr. William Merline, principal scientist with the Southwest Research Institute, and a participant in this research. “We can now make observations that once required either the scarce resources of space telescopes or spacecraft missions to asteroids. While these space telescopes and space missions are still needed for complete study of the asteroids, ground-based observations such as these will help tremendously in planning the mission observations and focusing the resources where they will be most effective.”

Asteroids are the collection of rocky objects orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. They were likely prevented from forming into a planet, partly due to Jupiter’s massive gravitational influence.

? Although the asteroids began their lives colliding gently, in a way that would lead them eventually to form a planet, Jupiter’s gravity eventually stirred up their orbits, and they began to collide at higher speeds,? added participant Dr. Christophe Dumas, planetary astronomer with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. ?These collisions tended to cause them to break up rather than gently stick together. The resulting fragments, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, are the asteroids we see today. They collide with each other and have impacted the Earth, Moon, and planets over time. One need only look at the scarred surface of our Moon to see the cumulative result. Study of the asteroid’s shape, size, and surface features helps us understand how these collisions operate and thus how our planet was, and still is, being affected by these impacts.?

Observations of the shapes of asteroids, such as those released today, can tell us about the types and severity of impacts that occurred, and possibly also give clues into the overall structure of an asteroid — for example, whether it may be solid rock, or a jumble of smaller rocks. Surface features can reveal a history of large impacts or variations in the composition that should, in turn, further help us understand the asteroid’s history.

Asteroid (511) Davida was discovered by R. S. Dugan in 1903 in Heidelberg, Germany. The (511) in Davida’s name means it was the 511th asteroid to be discovered and included in the list of asteroids maintained by the International Astronomical Union.

Team members responsible for the observations are Al Conrad, David Le Mignant, Randy Campbell, Fred Chaffee, Robert Goodrich, Shui Kwok of the W.M. Keck Observatory; Christophe Dumas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory; William Merline, Southwest Research Institute; Heidi Hammel, Space Science Institute; and Thierry Fusco, Onera, France.

The W.M. Keck Observatory is operated by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Source: Keck Press Release

Additional observations from astronomers have decreased the likelihood to virtually zero that Asteroid 2003 qq47 will strike the Earth in 2014. The asteroid was first discovered on August 24 by the LINEAR observatory and astronomers put its odds at 1 in 909,000 at 2003qq47 hitting the Earth, but the additional observations on Monday night extended those odds to 1 in 2.2 million, which is below the background risk of asteroid strikes on any given year. If the 1.3 km asteroid were to strike the Earth, it would cause immense damage on a continental scale… but it won’t.

When Asteroid 2003 qq47 was discovered last week from a tracking system in New Mexico, astronomers predicted that it could strike the Earth in 2014. Astronomers have now made 51 observations of its orbit and determined that the chance of 2003qq47 hitting the Earth are 1 in 909,000 and additional observations will probably reduce this possibility to zero. The space rock is estimated to be 1.2 km across and traveling at a speed of 30 km/second. If it did strike the Earth, it would cause widespread destruction across an entire continent, releasing the same amount of energy as 350 billion tonnes of TNT.

Image credit: ESO

A new image taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows an infrared halo around a nascent star. The image also shows jets of gas emanating from the region and colliding with the surrounding cloud. Although these rings have been theorized before, this is the first time one has actually been seen. The dust in the surrounding cloud is collapsing under its own gravity and will eventually form a true star.

A small and dark interstellar cloud with the rather cryptic name of DC303.8-14.2 is located in the inner part of the Milky Way galaxy. It is seen in the southern constellation Chamaeleon and consists of dust and gas. Astronomers classify it as a typical example of a “globule”.

As many other globules, this cloud is also giving birth to a star. Some years ago, observations in the infrared spectral region with the ESA IRAS satellite observatory detected the signature of a nascent star at its centre. Subsequent observations with the Swedish ESO Submillimetre Telescope (SEST) at La Silla (Chile) were carried out by Finnish astronomer Kimmo Lehtinen. He revealed that DC303.8-14.2 is collapsing under its own gravity, a process which will ultimately result in the birth of a new star from the gas and dust in this cloud.

Additional SEST observations of the millimetre emission of carbon monoxide (CO) molecules demonstrated a strong outflow from the nascent star. A small part of the gas that falls inward onto the central object is re-injected into the surrounding via this outward-bound “bipolar stream”.

The structure of DC303.8-14.2
The left panel in PR Photo 26a/03 shows the DC303.8-14.2 globule as it looks in red light. This image was obtained at wavelength 700 nm and has been reproduced from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) [1]. It covers a sky region of 20 x 20 arcmin2, or about 50% of the area of the full moon. The dust particles in the cloud reflect the light from stars, causing the cloud to appear brighter than the adjacent sky.

The brightness distribution over the cloud depends mostly on three factors connected to the dust. The first is the distribution of dust grains in the cloud, the way the dust density changes with the distance from the centre of the cloud. The second is the relative amount of light that is reflected by the dust particles. The third indicates the dominant direction in which the dust particles scatter light; this is dependent on the geometry of the grains and their preferred spatial alignment. Accurate observations of the brightness distribution over the surface of a globule allow an investigation of these properties and thus to learn more about the structure and composition of the cloud.

From the image obtained in red light (left panel in PR Photo 26a/03) it appears, somewhat surprisingly, that the brightest area of DC303.8-14.2 is not where there is most dust. Instead, it takes the form of a bright ring around the centre. This rim corresponds to a region where the intensity of the light from stars behind the cloud is reduced by a moderate factor of 3 to 5 when passing through the cloud and where the light-scattering efficiency of the dust grains in the cloud is the highest.

Observing with ISAAC on the VLT
In order to study the structure of DC303.8-14.2 in more detail, Kimmo Lehtinen and his team of Finnish and Danish astronomers [2] used the near-infrared imaging capabilities of the ISAAC multi-mode instrument on the 8.2-m VLT ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile). Under good observing conditions, they obtained a mosaic image of this cloud in several near-IR wavelength bands, including the J- (centered at wavelength 1.25 ?m), H- (1.65) and Ks-bands (2.17). These exposures were combined to produce images of DC303.8-14.2, two of which are shown in PR Photo 26a/03 (middle and right panels).

The middle image shows the central part of the globule in the H-band. A bright rim is clearly detected – this is the first time such a ring is seen in infrared light around a globule.

This rim has a smaller size in infrared than in visible light. This is because the absorption of infrared light by dust particles is smaller than the absorption of visible light. More dust is then needed to produce the same amount of scattering and to show a rim in infrared light. The infrared rim will therefore show up in an area where the dust density is higher, i.e. closer to the centre of the cloud, than the visible-light rim.

Similar rings were also detected in the J- and Ks-band images and, as expected, of different sizes. Thus the mere observation of the size (and shape) of a bright rim already provides information about the internal structure of the cloud. In the case of DC303.8-14.2, a detailed evaluation shows that the dust density of the centre is so high that any visible light from the nascent star in there would be dimmed at least 1000 times before it emerges from the cloud.
Getting a bonus: Jets from a young star

As an unexpected and welcome bonus, the astronomers also detected several jet- and knot-like structures in the Ks-band image (right panel in PR Photo 26a/03), near the IRAS source. The area shown represents the innermost region of the cloud (65 x 50 arcsec2, or just 1/500 of the area of the DSS image to the left).

Several knot-like structures on a line like a string of beads are clearly seen. They are most probably regions where the gas ejected by the young stellar object rams into the surrounding medium, creating zones of compressed and hot molecular hydrogen. Such structures are known by astronomers as “Herbig-Haro objects”, cf. ESO PR 17/99.

More information
A general description of the methods used to study and model surface brightness observations of small dark clouds in given in a basic paper by Kimmo Lehtinen and Kalevi Mattila in the research journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (Vol. 309, p. 570 1996). The results presented here will be published in a forthcoming paper in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Notes

[1]: The Digitized Sky Survey was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions.

[2]: The team is composed of Kimmo Lehtinen, Kalevi Mattila from the Observatory of the University of Helsinki (Finland), Petri V?is?nen from ESO/Chile and Jens Knude from the Observatory of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). P. V?is?nen is also affiliated with the University of Helsinki.

Original Source: ESO News Release

Image credit: NASA

Seven asteroids were recently renamed to honour the astronauts of the space shuttle Columbia. The asteroids are all 5 to 7 km long, and were discovered on the nights of July 19-21, 2001 at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego by astronomer Eleanor F. Helin. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory proposed the idea, and it was recently approved by the International Astronomical Union, which is responsible for maintaining the names of celestial objects.

The final crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia was memorialized in the cosmos as seven asteroids orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter were named in their honor today.

The Space Shuttle Columbia crew– Commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; Mission Specialists Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark; and Israeli payload specialist Ilan Ramon, will have celestial memorials, easily found from Earth.

The names, proposed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., were recently approved by the International Astronomical Union. The official clearinghouse of asteroid data, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Minor Planet Center, released the dedication today.

The seven asteroids were discovered at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego on the nights of July 19-21, 2001, by former JPL astronomer Eleanor F. Helin, who retired in July 2002. The seven asteroids range in diameter from five to seven kilometers (3.1 to 4.3 miles). The Palomar Observatory is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

“Asteroids have been around for billions of years and will remain for billions more,” said Dr. Raymond Bambery, Principal Investigator of JPL’s Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System. “I like to think that in the years, decades and millennia ahead people will look to the heavens, locate these seven celestial sentinels and remember the sacrifice made by the Columbia astronauts.?

The 28th and final flight of Columbia (STS-107) was a 16-day mission dedicated to research in physical, life and space sciences. The seven astronauts aboard Columbia worked 24 hours a day, in two alternating shifts, successfully conducting approximately 80 separate experiments. On February 1, 2003, the Columbia and its crew were lost over the western United States during the spacecraft’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.

Asteroids are rocky fragments left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Most of the known asteroids orbit the Sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists think there are probably millions of asteroids, ranging in size from less than one kilometer (.62 mile) wide to hundreds of kilometers across.

More than 100,000 asteroids have been detected since the first was discovered back on January 1, 1801. Ceres, the first asteroid discovered, is also the largest at about 933 kilometers (580 miles) in diameter.

The Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System is managed by JPL for NASA’s Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.

Information about JPL’s Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System is available at http://neat.jpl.nasa.gov. More information on the newly named asteroids is at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/columbia-tribute.cfm.

For information about NASA on the Internet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Image credit: Harvard

New images taken by the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory show Asteroid Juno with a huge chunk taken out of it. Harvard astronomer Sallie Baliunas used the adaptive optics system on the Hooker telescope, which compensates for distortions in the atmosphere, to take photos of the 241 km asteroid with incredible clarity. The photos show that Juno is misshapen and has a 100 km crater from an impact with another asteroid in the past.

Cambridge, MA -If someone sneaks a bite of your chocolate chip cookie, they leave behind evidence of their pilferage in the form of a crescent of missing cookie. The same is true in our solar system, where an impact can take a bite out of a planet or moon, leaving behind evidence in the form of a crater. By combining modern technology with a historical telescope, astronomers have discovered that the asteroide Juno has a bite out of it. The first direct images of the surface of Juno show that it is scarred by a fresh impact crater.

Juno, the third asteroid ever discovered, was first spotted by astronomers early in the 19th century. It orbits the Sun with thousands of other bits of space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. One of the largest asteroids, at a size of 150 miles across, Juno essentially is a leftover building block of the solar system.

Astronomer Sallie Baliunas (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues photographed Juno when it was located relatively nearby in astronomical terms, about 10 percent further from the Earth than the Earth is from the Sun. Even at that distance, Juno appeared very tiny in the sky, subtending only 330 milli-arcseconds – the equivalent of a dime seen at a distance of 7 miles. Imaging Juno at the high resolution needed to resolve surface details thus presented a challenge.

To solve the problem, the scientists used an adaptive optics system connected to the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. Adaptive optics enables astronomers to compensate for the distortion created by air currents in our planet’s atmosphere, yielding images as sharp and clear as those taken in space.

Their surface maps showed that Juno, like other asteroids, is misshapen rather than round, and that it has “sharp” edges. Even better, as Juno tumbled through space during the night of observing, a “bite” came into view – an area that appeared dark as seen at near-infrared wavelengths. The astronomers concluded that the asteroid had recently (in astronomical terms) collided with another object, resulting in a 60-mile-wide crater, or possibly a smaller crater that is surrounded by a 60-mile blanket of ejecta debris.

“I look at an asteroid as a garden – a garden not of flowers and leaves, but one of rubble and dust churned up by constant impacts. This process of gardening pulverizes the asteroid’s surface into a fine-grained regolith,” said Baliunas. “The recent, large impact on Juno gives us an opportunity to see through the regolith and study excavated material from beneath the surface – a rare look into the material out of which the early Earth was formed.”

The blast that knocked a bite out of Juno may also have provided researchers with a convenient way of studying that asteroid up close without ever leaving our planet. Some meteorites found on the Earth are actually pieces of large asteroids like Juno. Those pieces were broken off and launched into space by an impact, and then fell on our planet. The newly-found impact crater on Juno may have sent samples of that asteroid to the Earth.

This remarkable result demonstrates how technology can be used to renew historical observatories, giving them a new lease on life. The Hooker telescope, now nearing the end of its first century of observing, can use adaptive optics systems to obtain views of the cosmos as clear as though the telescope were in space. Hence, the telescope that Edwin Hubble and his assistant used to discover evidence of the expanding universe continues to make groundbreaking discoveries today.

These results were published in the May 2003 issue of the astronomy journal Icarus.

Original Source: CfA News Release

Image credit: NASA

Researchers have built a computer simulation that better predicts how large asteroids will interact with the Earth’s atmosphere. They found that more asteroids blow up in the atmosphere than previously thought, reducing the risk of them hitting populated areas or causing tidal waves. Their model says that an asteroid has to be 200 metres in diameter or above before it can get through the atmosphere, and these only hit the Earth once every 170,000 years.

Researchers from Imperial College London and the Russian Academy of Sciences have built a computer simulation that predicts whether asteroids with a diameter up to one kilometre (km) will explode in the atmosphere or hit the surface.

The results indicate that asteroids with a diameter greater than 200 metres (the length of two football pitches) will hit the surface approximately once every 160,000 years – way down on previous estimates of impacts every 2,500 years.

The findings also predict that many more asteroids blow up in the atmosphere than previous estimates, which means the hazard posed by impact-generated tidal waves or tsunamis is lower than previous predictions. The researchers suggest that proposals to extend monitoring of Near Earth Objects (NEO) to include much smaller objects should be reviewed.

Dr Phil Bland of Imperial’s Department of Earth Science and Engineering and a Royal Society University Research Fellow, said:

“There is overwhelming evidence that impacts from space have caused catastrophes for life on Earth in the past, and will do so again.

“On the Moon it’s easier to track the number, frequency and size of collisions because there is no atmosphere, so everything hits the surface. On Earth the atmosphere acts like a screen and geological activity erodes many craters too.

“Massive impacts of the type thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs leave an indelible print on the Earth but we have not been able to accurately document the effect of smaller impacts. Now, we have a handle on the size of ‘rock’ we really need to worry about and how well the Earth’s atmosphere protects us.”

When small asteroids hit the atmosphere the two forces collide like two objects smashing together, which often breaks the asteroid into fragments. Until now, scientists have relied on the ‘pancake’ model of asteroid impact to calculate whether the asteroid will explode in the atmosphere. This treats the cascade of fragments as a single continuous liquid that spreads out over a larger area – to form a ‘pancake’. But a new model known as the ‘separate fragment’ (SF) model, which was developed by co-author of the study, Dr Natalya Artemieva of the Russian Academy of Science, has challenged this approach.

“While the pancake model can accurately predict the height from the Earth’s surface at which the asteroid will break up, it doesn’t give an accurate picture of how the asteroid will impact,” explains Dr Bland. “The SF model tracks the individual forces acting on each fragment as it descends through the atmosphere.”

To create a more accurate model of how asteroids interact with the atmosphere the researchers ran more than 1,000 simulations using both models. Objects made of either iron or stone, known as ‘impactors’, were used to reflect the composition of asteroids and experiments were run with varying diameters up to 1 km.

The researchers found the number of impacts for iron impactors were comparable using both models. For stone the pancake model significantly overestimated the survivability rate across the range used.

The SF simulations also allowed the researchers to define the different styles of fragmentation and impact rates for iron and stone, which correspond closely with crater records and meteorite data.

“Our data show that over most of the size range we investigated stony asteroids need to be 1,000 times bigger than the iron ones to make a similar sized crater. Much larger objects are disrupted in the atmosphere than previously thought.

“But we are not out of the woods yet,” added Dr Bland “asteroids that fragment in the atmosphere still pose a significant threat to human life.”

Dr Phil Bland is a member of the Meteorite and Impact Group that includes scientists from Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum.

Original Source: Imperial College News Release

Image credit: NASA

A team of researchers from Louisiana State University have uncovered a connection between a meteor strike and a mass extinction that happened 380 million years ago called the middle Devonian event. It happened at a time when small plants, wingless insects and spiders inhabited the land, and everything else lived in the sea – 40% of all life disappeared from the fossil records. They found evidence of the strike by measuring the magnetic signature of layers of rock. When a large asteroid hits the Earth, it distributes a layer of dust around the entire planet – if a strata of rock has the same magnetic signature in different parts of planet, it’s evidence of a strike.

It’s the stuff of science fiction movies. Bruce Willis, by a mighty effort, saving the world from extinction by a huge meteor.

But Bruce Willis won’t do it, and in our current state of readiness, neither will anyone else. That is why LSU geophysicist Brooks Ellwood is plumbing the geologic record, trying to correlate known mass extinctions to meteor strikes.

“When we think about the human race and life in general, what do we worry about? We worry about nuclear holocaust and major glaciation. Then we worry about the giant chunks of rock that fly past Earth all the time,” Ellwood said.

“We can’t see them till they’re here, we can’t stop one, so the question is, how often do they hit the Earth and cause major mass extinctions? Are extinctions often caused by impacts? If so, we want to be sure we are prepared.”

Ellwood and four other researchers have just published an article in the journal Science in which they tie an early mass extinction to a meteor strike. This extinction happened 380 million years ago in what is called the middle Devonian. It was a time when only small plants, wingless insects and spiders inhabited the land and everything else lived in the sea. About 40 percent of all species disappeared from the fossil record at this time.

The extinction has been known to geologists for a long time but this is the first time it has been tied to a meteor strike. This is also the oldest known impact that has been tied to a mass extinction.

Ellwood is quick to point out that because the extinction and the meteor strike happened at the same time does not prove the impact caused the extinction — but it certainly suggests it.

One of the great difficulties in determining whether an extinction happened on a global scale, or was a local event caused by a volcano or some other terrestrial force, is identifying the same strata of rock at different locations on the globe. Finding a layer of earth in Colorado, for example, and finding that same layer in Australia is no simple task.

“The same layer of earth is exposed to different conditions in different parts of the world,” Ellwood said. “Weathering, upheavals, volcanos, earthquakes and flooding all confuse the geologic record, making it incomplete and open to interpretation.”

The layers can also be extremely thin, he said, showing a picture of the location of his latest research. The layer he was looking at — near the top of a barren plateau in the Anti Atlas desert near Rissani in Morocco — was about the thickness of a felt-tipped marker and only distinguishable from the soil around it by its reddish color.

What is unique about Ellwood’s work, however, is the means he uses to identify the different layers in the geologic record: induced magnetism.

“Everything is magnetic,” he said. “If I put your finger in a magnetic coil and turn it on, your finger will be magnetized.” Ellwood uses this phenomenon to take “magnetic signatures” of geologic samples. The magnetic signature of a layer of earth will be the same anywhere in the world, making it relatively easy to identify strata, if they can be found. These signatures also make it easy to identify meteor strikes. “The magnetic pattern associated with an impact layer is often distinctive, making it easier to find in a thick sequence of strata,” he said.

Working with LSU graduate students Steve Benoist and Chris Wheeler; structural geologist Ahmed El Hassani of the University of Rabat, Morocco; and Devonian biostratigrapher Rex Crick of the University of Texas at Arlington, Ellwood was able to find high concentrations of shocked quartz, microscopic spherules and microcrysts in this layer, sure signs of a meteor impact. Benoist is a paleontologist and Wheeler is an isotope geochemist; both have since moved on.

The past 550 million years are divided up by geologists into about 90 “stages.” Each stage is distinguished from another by a change in the fossil record. To date, only four of these stages show strong evidence of a meteor strike, Ellwood’s discovery being the latest, as well as the oldest. The most recent, best known extinction is the K-T boundary at which the dinosaurs died out, about 65 million years ago. There have been five major mass extinctions and many smaller ones since then.

“We know that meteors have struck the Earth hundreds of times,” Ellwood said. “If I had to guess, I would say that once every 5 million years a meteor big enough to cause a mass extinction hits the Earth.

“We could protect ourselves if we wanted. We went to the moon, we can figure out how to destroy or deflect a meteor. All it takes is the political will — and an awareness of the threat.”

The work of Ellwood and his team, published in the prestigious journal Science, is a step in that direction.

Original Source: LSU News Release

A Japanese M-5 rocket lifted off on Friday carrying a spacecraft which will be the first to ever collect samples from the surface of an asteroid. Called Muses-C, the spacecraft will take only two years to reach asteroid 1998 SF 36 – one of the Earth?s closest space neighbours ? and then return to Earth by 2007. A grapefruit-sized marker imprinted with nearly 900,000 names will also be dropped onto the asteroid?s surface.