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Earth Space NASA News Science Technology

Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth (cnn.com) 237

Posted by BeauHD from the quasi-moon dept.
Frosty Piss writes from a report via CNN: A small asteroid has been found circling Earth. Scientists say it looks like the asteroid, named 2016 HO3, has been out there for about 50 years. Calculations indicate 2016 HO3 has been a stable quasi-satellite of Earth for almost a century, and it will continue to follow this pattern as Earth's companion for centuries to come. Scientists think the asteroid is between 120 and 300 feet (37 to 91 meters) in diameter, and NASA says it never gets closer than 9 million miles (14 million kilometers) from Earth. It was found on April 27, 2016 by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope in Haleakala, Hawaii. So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years? Probably the same way we've missed all the flying saucers!
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Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth More

Small Asteroid Discovered Orbiting Earth

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  • To put it into perspective (Score:5, Informative)

    by shockwaverider ( 78582 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @03:06AM (#52334053)

    It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.

    Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by umafuckit ( 2980809 )

      It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.

      Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?

      There will be no asteroid mining. It's never going to be cost effective.

      • Re:To put it into perspective (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 17, 2016 @03:29AM (#52334135)

        Never is such a long time.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You have a limited imagination. Soon or later humans are going to have to leave this planet or face extinction. At some point moon bases will exist, land there will have value as the uber rich make their claims, resources will be needed. Metals and minerals are surrounding us, those on Earth are being wasted and will become rarer. Fast forward a million years... You can do the rest.

        Perhaps you're mistaking this site for reddit or the daily mail, where attention spans are measured in atto-seconds, and the fu

        • you're funny, in a million years we could be unintelligent apelike creatures

          we've barely scratched the 25 mile crust surface of this earth of resources, we're really not running out of anything. not even helium despite the alarmist nonsense (most helium is just vented from nat gas wells, wasted)

        • You have a limited imagination. Soon or later humans are going to have to leave this planet or face extinction.

          Why? Even if Earth was hit by an asteroid it would be a better place to live than anywhere else.

      • Re:To put it into perspective (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Kokuyo ( 549451 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @05:17AM (#52334453) Journal

        Jeez, what a surefire way to be wrong you've chosen. Others already commented on the infinite time frame you've chosen but I'd like to add that "cost effective" is pretty relative.

        There just needs to be a shortage of material found on an asteroid that is either life threatening or lowers our quality of life enough for people to decide they're going to try it.

        And why should this never be cost effective? Robotic mining equipment needs to be deployed once. And without much gravity to speak off, all you need to do is launch the mined material in the direction of a desert every few days.

        Can't be that hard to accomplish.

        • It's probably a little harder than that. First of all you don't just launch stuff in the direction of a desert, you launch them retrograde to the asteroid's orbit so it gets into an orbit with a perigee close to earth. Then you have to keep it from burning up in the atmosphere, which means you'll have to enclose it in some sort of vessel that can survive reentry (unless you send a really huge chunk and accept the fact that much of it will burn up in the atmosphere and you'll have to dig up the rest from the

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by jafiwam ( 310805 )

            Or, you could... you know... just build stuff IN ORBIT where raw materials cost 87 thousand times what it would cost on the surface.

            Moving and parking that thing would be a bitch, but it's value as raw materials to make things in space would be immense.

            Especially true if it's made of metals. You could do all kinds of things, make reaction mass for out of Earth orbit craft, make beams and struts to put together a station, use it for soil, counterweights, etc.

            If it's not metal, you could get gasses or pos

            • Don't forget water; it will be the most valuable space resource for the foreseeable future. You can use it as propellant, you can make rocket fuel out of it, it's necessary for most chemical processes you may wish to setup, you need it to live (if you are sending people), you can use it as a radiation shield, ... it's a pretty amazing resource.

        • And why should this never be cost effective? Robotic mining equipment needs to be deployed once. And without much gravity to speak off, all you need to do is launch the mined material in the direction of a desert every few days.

          Robotic mining equipment only needs to be launched once (presuming it never needs maintenance of any kind) - but the fuel needed to deorbit the mined material is another matter entirely.

          • Sorry, no. You don't need fuel (or much of it anyway) to deorbit anything.

            To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it. After that, you can just let it fall into the atmosphere. There's various ways you can handle that without your valuable ores (or better yet, fully processed ores) simply vaporizing: you can build some

            • you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well

              If only there were some source of extraneous mass on a mined asteroid that could be thrown off to produce thrust.

              • Yes, you can use a mass driver. But that requires some kind of energy source too; mass doesn't get thrown off an asteroid for free. But do you even need to bother? This isn't human cargo, so time isn't quite so important. You can probably just use an ion engine to push the thing into a trajectory that it'll fall to the Earth with aerobraking. Though more likely, it'd probably make more sense to try to refine the ores in space first, so we're not just dropping giant asteroids on Earth; smaller (and more

            • nonsense, it can take an immense amount of fuel to de-orbit something, depends on mass and delta vee needed. For example, let's consider de-orbiting around the sun. it takes more energy to reach the orbit of mercury from an orbit at earth's distance, than to leave the solar system entirely, let alone to send anything into the Sun. If an asteroid needs a huge delta vee change to be captured by earth, large amounts of fuel will be needed.

              • You have no idea what you're talking about. The Apollo missions did not need "an immense amount of fuel" to return astronauts to the Earth. That's just stupid.

                Have you entirely forgotten that the Earth has an atmosphere?

                • Good luck aerobraking the quantities of materials needed for space mining to be viable. Apollo capsules are small and light compared to even a single truck full of ore. Apollo was only coming back from the Moon, asteroids are much further out and would require much more delta V to reach the Earth's atmosphere. They would then be coming in much faster, whilst carrying more mass.

            • To get the mining equipment launched and out to where it's going to be used, sure: you'll need lots of fuel for that one. To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it.

              It takes more energy to deorbit something than to escape it entirely, because orbital velocity is already 1/sqrt(2) of escape velocity. Getting to the sun requires a velocity more than three times as high as it takes to get out of the solar system entirely, which basically means about 10X as much fuel. (The fuel itself is heavy, so it's higher than that.)

            • To deorbit it, no; you might need a tiny bit of fuel to push it towards our gravity well, but that's about it. After that, you can just let it fall into the atmosphere.

              Um, no. That's not how it works. You need sufficient fuel to change it's perapsis so that it's inside the atmosphere - and that can be a great deal of fuel indeed. (Nothing just 'falls' into the atmosphere.) Not to mention, if you're not already in Earth's gravity well (I.E. in Earth orbit), you'll need a great deal *more* fuel to ren

              • Rocks being returned to earth are most certainly going to be guided in some manner. But as for fuel, the Apollo capsule did not have a lot of fuel on board. Somehow they managed to get back to Earth intact.

                • Rocks being returned to earth are most certainly going to be guided in some manner.

                  Which means guidance and control packages will have to be regularly shipped up. It won't be as simple as you mistakenly assumed.

                  But as for fuel, the Apollo capsule did not have a lot of fuel on board. Somehow they managed to get back to Earth intact.

                  The Apollo capsule may not have, but the Apollo Service Module certainly did.

                  Seriously, are you so monumentally stupid you don't even know how Apollo worked?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rossdee ( 243626 )

        : It's never going to be cost effective."

        asteroid mining is not forminerals for Earth. Its for use in space construction or on the Moon.
        It costs way more in energy,fuel or propellant to lift something out of Earths gravity well and thick atmosphere than it does to move it from the asteroid belt of even Kuiper Belt to geostat orbit or L5

        • You don't need to go to the asteroid belt to find asteroids to mine; they're buzzing right by the Earth all the time. If you can find asteroids with valuable-enough ores (such as gold, platinum, rhodium, etc.) then it could very well be worth it to launch robotic (or at least remote-control, these distances aren't that far) missions to retrieve them and bring them to Earth.

      • It's about 37 times further away than the moon. Pretty far away in other words.

        Wonder if it would be a candidate for the first asteroid mining venture?

        There will be no asteroid mining. It's never going to be cost effective.

        But there will certainly be experimentation, and depending on what this asteroid is made of, it could probably be a good candidate for testing.

      • Well, when I was young papers claimed that plenty of asteroids are pure metals with a cover of dust (like the iridium asteroid killing the dinosaurs ... well, the one that made the Yucatan bay).

        If that is in fact true (never dug into it) then it might be very easily cost effective.

        On the other hand, the question is anyway what you want to make with it. If we indeed would want to build a space habitat for a few 1000 people, such an asteroid, relatively close to earth and even simpler to mine than moon, would

    • It's a good candidate for an 'asteroid redirect' mission in any case, but the mining potential depends on what it's made of. Chances are it made of something that would be useful up there. I would bet that Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are interested in this rock. It would give them a chance to prove out the basic technology they'll need in the long term, and which we'll all need for planetary protection.

      It's already in a pretty handy orbit, but I'd like to see them send a 'gravity tug' to c

  • 50 years, century... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @03:15AM (#52334087)
    So is it 50 years for small values of a century, or is it a century for large values of 50 years?

  • So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @03:19AM (#52334099) Journal

    So how do we miss a 300 foot object that has been orbiting the Earth for around 50 years?

    We weren't looking for that particular object.

    Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Errtu76 ( 776778 )

      Wonderful H2G2 quote! :-)

    • Yep, passed over Jodrell bank without a blip, which was a pity as it was exactly the sort of thing they had been looking for.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Yeah, "orbit" is a term that people assume has a secondary meaning that it really doesn't.

      "orbit" means you're moving in a circle around something. Nowhere does it say that circle isn't as large as the solar system itself.

      However, people take "orbit" to mean "close enough to send a ship down" because they watch too much star trek.

      Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun. We are also orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. That's not close either.

      • Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun.

        Actually the sun is quite close in terms of the solar system. It's closer than Mars and Venus sometimes -- in fact the sun can be closer than any planet at times. It's also more than 3x closer than Jupiter's closest approach, and we've sent plenty of probes to Jupiter. Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.

        • Problem with landing probes on the sun is it's a little hot.

          Well, why can't they schedule the landing for nighttime when it doesn't shine?

          (OK, old joke, I'll quit now.)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pjt33 ( 739471 )

          The other problem is that it takes more energy to send a probe to the Sun than to Pluto. Obviously that's not insurmountable: we have, after all, sent probes to Mercury. But the point is that distance isn't the only thing that matters.

        • it takes more energy to reach the orbit of mercury from orbit at earth's distance than to leave solar system, let alone send something into sun

    • Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

      Hint: that's why it's called "space".

    • We weren't looking for that particular object.

      Also, space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

      We should have been listening for it after all space is the final front ear :D

    • We weren't looking for that particular object.

      Even when we are looking for a particular object and even one that we made ourselves and is on the planet we seem to have incredible difficulty finding it. Just look at flight MH370 where we still don't really know what happened to it or where it went down despite a huge international effort and the size of that is very comparable at 73.9m in length.

    • IN the USA, we have no way to even know which of our neighbors are chemists.

  • It's just biding it's time.
    Better deep freeze Robert Duvall to have him take care of it later.

  • You might refer to it as as asteroid... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Serif ( 87265 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @05:10AM (#52334437)

    We prefer the term "Mother Ship"/

  • Wait... (Score:2)

    by johnw ( 3725 )

    ...that's no moon!

  • Just one of Santa's early jet-propelled sleighs to cope with population growth (you think flying reindeer were always going to keep up? get real)

    Unfortunately this one reached near escape velocity. The test elves bailed out in time.

    So nothing to see here. Pay no attention to 2016 HO HO HO

  • 3e-09 radians, 5e-19 stradians. in just 50 years?? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @07:37AM (#52334825) Journal
    Quick mental calculation shows that object is subtending 3e-09 radians at Earth. Need back of the envelop for solid angle. About 5e-19 stradians if it its a ball 300 feet across. Give or take a few orders of magnitude.

    Now the question is not "how come we missed it for 50 years?". The question is "how come we found it in just 50 years! OMG our astronomers are awesome!".

  • Fucking CNN (Score:5, Informative)

    by oh_my_080980980 ( 773867 ) on Friday June 17, 2016 @10:18AM (#52335729)
    Learn to fucking report. The asteroid orbits the Sun not the Earth. It's not a moon nor satellite. It's best described as a companion because the asteriod and earth follow SIMILAR ORBIT around the sun. Nothing more. Just read the JPL article: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/n... [nasa.gov] Fuck off CNN.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )
      It's more than just a similar orbit. The asteroid appears to be locked into its orbit by Earth's gravity, which is why JPL called it a quasi-satellite or companion. But yea, submitter should have skipped the CNN nonsense.

  • See "Mr. Bass's Planetoid", the 2nd or 3rd book in her children's book series about the mushroom people. I remember reading it as a kid, but can't recall too many details.

  • Wait... maybe it is. Would this count as Earth's 2nd moon / moonlet rather than an asteroid, if it's in natural stable orbit around the Earth?

  • Ah, those first atomic explosions got someone's attention.
    After due consideration, they've stayed the F away out there, since.

  • Lottery? Or let the astronomers do it?

    I suggest "Invisus."

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