— NASA's Hubble confirms that galaxies are the ultimate recyclers — New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are expanding astronomers' understanding of the ways in which galaxies continuously recycle immense volumes of hydrogen gas and heavy…
— Frozen comet had a watery past, University of Arizona scientists find — For the first time, scientists have found convincing evidence for the presence of liquid water in a comet, shattering the current paradigm that comets never get warm enough to melt…
— Sugar-grain sized meteorites rocked the climates of early Earth and Mars — Bombardments of 'micro-meteorites' on Earth and Mars four billion years ago may have caused the planets' climates to cool dramatically, hampering their ability to support life, according…
— Astrophysicist: White dwarfs could be fertile ground for other Earths — Planet hunters have found hundreds of planets outside the solar system in the last decade, though it is unclear whether even one might be habitable. But it could be that the best place…
— Integral spots matter a millisecond from doom — ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory has spotted extremely hot matter just a millisecond before it plunges into the oblivion of a black hole. But is it really doomed? These unique observations…
— MESSENGER spacecraft to swing into orbit around Mercury — At 8:45 p.m. EDT on March 17, the MESSENGER spacecraft will execute a 15-minute manoeuvre that will place it into orbit around Mercury, making it the first craft ever to do so, and…
— Baby stars born to 'napping' parents — Cardiff University astronomers believe that a young star's long 'napping' could trigger the formation of a second generation of smaller stars and planets orbiting around it…
— Oldest objects in solar system indicate a turbulent beginning — Scientists have found that calcium, aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs), some of the oldest objects in the solar system, formed far away from our sun and then later fell back into the…
— Oxygen isotope analysis tells of the wandering life of a dust grain 4.5 billion years ago — Scientists have performed a micro-probe analysis of the core and outer layers of a pea-sized piece of a meteorite some 4.57 billion years old to reconstruct the history of its formation,…
Pan-STARRS discovers its first potentially hazardous asteroid
The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope has discovered an asteroid that will come within 4 million miles of Earth in mid-October. The object is about 150 feet in diameter and was discovered in images acquired on September 16, when it was about 20 million miles away.
It is the first 'potentially hazardous object' (PHO) to be discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey and has been given the designation '2010 ST3.'
'Although this particular object won't hit Earth in the immediate future, its discovery shows that Pan-STARRS is now the most sensitive system dedicated to discovering potentially dangerous asteroids,' said Robert Jedicke, a University of Hawaii member of the PS1 Scientific Consortium, who is working on the asteroid data from the telescope. 'This object was discovered when it was too far away to be detected by other asteroid surveys,' Jedicke noted.
The Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics is a major partner in the Consortium.
Most of the largest PHOs have already been catalogued, but scientists suspect that there are many more under a mile across that have not yet been discovered. These could cause devastation on a regional scale if they ever hit our planet. Such impacts are estimated to occur once every few thousand years.
Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Centre (MPC), said, 'I congratulate the Pan-STARRS project on this discovery. It is proof that the PS1 telescope, with its Gigapixel Camera and its sophisticated computerised system for detecting moving objects, is capable of finding potentially dangerous objects that no one else has found.' The MPC, located in Cambridge, Mass., was established by the International Astronomical Union in 1947 to collect and disseminate positional measurements for asteroids and comets, to confirm their discoveries, and to give them preliminary designations.
Pan-STARRS expects to discover tens of thousands of new asteroids every year with sufficient precision to accurately calculate their orbits around the sun. Any sizable object that looks like it may come close to Earth within the next 50 years or so will be labelled 'potentially hazardous' and carefully monitored. NASA experts believe that, given several years warning, it should be possible to organise a space mission to deflect any asteroid that is discovered to be on a collision course with Earth.
Pan-STARRS has broader goals as well. PS1 and its bigger brother, PS4, which will be operational later in this decade, are expected to discover a million or more asteroids in total, as well as more distant targets such as variable stars, supernovas, and mysterious bursts from galaxies across more than half the universe. PS1 became fully operational in June 2010.
Or subscribe for our Newsletter, a free e-mail publication. It is published practically every day.
NASA calls on APL to send a probe to the Sun
Cassini tracks raging Saturn storm
Galaxy Evolution Explorer celebrates 5 years in space
Compact galaxies in early Universe pack a big punch