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This Asteroid Could Hit Earth — Let’s Name it Before it Does

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NASA is calling on students around the world to help name a potentially dangerous near-Earth asteroid that the agency is hoping to visit with an unmanned probe that will collect samples of the space rock and return them home.

The asteroid, currently known as (101955) 1999 RQ36 could pose a threat to Earth when it swings close to our planet 170 years from now. Measuring 1,837 feet wide, asteroid 1999 RQ36 has a 1-in-1,000 chance of slamming into Earth in the year 2182, researchers have said.

NASA is planning an ambitious mission to return samples from the surface of 1999 RQ36. The expedition, called Osiris-Rex (short for Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer), is scheduled to launch in 2016. The Osiris-Rex mission is expected to cost $800 million, a figure that does not include the cost of a launch vehicle, agency officials have said.

Samples brought back by the Osiris-Rex mission could help scientists unlock some of the mysteries of the solar system’s origin some 4.5 billion years ago, and the organic molecules that may have led to life on Earth. NASA is also planning to launch astronauts to an asteroid by the year 2025.

By soliciting suggestions from students, NASA is hoping to engage the next generation of scientists in astronomy and spaceflight.

“Because the samples returned by the mission will be available for study for future generations, it is possible the person who names the asteroid will grow up to study the regolith we return to Earth,” Jason Dworkin, Osiris-Rex project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement.

The agency’s competition is open to students worldwide, under the age of 18. Each participant may submit one name, which can be up to 16 characters in length. Students are required to also include a short explanation for their suggested name.

“Asteroids are just cool and 1999 RQ36 deserves a cool name!” Bill Nye, chief executive officer for The Planetary Society, said in a statement. “Engaging kids around the world in a naming contest will get them tuned in to asteroids and asteroid science.”

The deadline for entering the contest is Dec. 2, 2012, and submissions should be made by an adult on behalf of the student, NASA officials said.

A panel of judges will then review the submissions, and a winner will be announced when the chosen name is approved by the International Astronomical Union Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature.

“Our mission will be focused on this asteroid for more than a decade,” Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the Osiris-Rex mission at the University of Arizona in Tucson, said in a statement. “We look forward to having a name that is easier to say than (101955) 1999 RQ36.”

Asteroid 1999 RQ36 was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research survey at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington. This space rock census is part of NASA’s Near Earth Observation Program in Washington, D.C., which aims to catalog near-Earth asteroids and comets.

The clunky name (101955) 1999 RQ36 was designated by the Minor Planet Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. Once a newly discovered asteroid is characterized, and certain criteria are met to establish its orbit, the Minor Planet Center gives it an initial alphanumeric name.

NASA is hosting the asteroid naming contest in partnership with The Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif., MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and the University of Arizona.

Article From Source.com

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What will happen after sun vaporizes Earth? Scorched planets hold clues.

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Scientists say they’ve found two planets that survived being swallowed by a red-giant star. Earth won’t be so fortunate when our sun becomes a red giant in 5 billion years, but the find shows what can happen to solar systems after such dramatic events.

An artist’s rendering of the two planets orbiting close to the former red-giant core.

S. Charpinet

Forget this season’s final episode of “Survivor.” The ultimate survivors appear to be two small planet-candidates engulfed for a billion years inside the searing envelope of a red-giant star. And they emerged to tell the tale.

The planets are a glimpse at what can happen to a solar system when a star begins its death throes, becoming bloated and red as it consumes the last of the hydrogen fuel in its core. The same fate awaits our sun in about 5 billion years.

The two planet-candidates announced Wednesday are among the tiniest yet revealed by data from NASA‘s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. And they hold the potential to shed light not only on how planets could survive such a torching, but also how they might affect the evolution of red-giant stars themselves.

“On many levels, it’s very cool,” says Elizabeth Green, a researcher with the University of Arizona‘s Steward Observatory and a member of the team reporting its observations in the Dec. 22 issue of the journal Nature.

A red giant originates as a star roughly like our sun – between 0.5 and 8 times the sun’s mass. As the star exhausts its hydrogen fuel, its core collapses. The heat of that event causes remaining hydrogen in the outer shell to begin fusion, and the star’s outer layer, or photosphere, expands.

By the time the red-giant phase of our sun ends, the Earth, Venus, and Mercury are likely to be vaporized. But scientists have examples of other objects – planets and brown-dwarf stars – that survived being enveloped by red-giant stars they orbited.

None of them, however, is like the ones reported Tuesday. All the previous examples were bigger objects that orbited farther from their parent stars to begin with. For that reason, they didn’t spiral as deeply into their stars’ photospheres. When these stars’ red-giant phase ended – and the stars shrank back to become helium-burning so-called subdwarf B stars – the planets survived.

By contrast, the objects reported Tuesday appear to have traveled far deeper into the red-giant’s photosphere and survived only as tiny remnants.

Indeed, the planet-candidates orbit so close to their subdwarf B star, named KIC 05807616, that their years are 5.8 hours and 8.2 hours long, respectively. With one side constantly facing the star, the planets’ sun-side faces would roast at between 14,000 and 16,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

So how did the planet-candidates survive such a blistering? The team suggests that the objects may represent the rocky cores of stripped-down gas-giant planets that once orbited farther away.

As KIC 05807616 went through its red-giant phase and expanded, the two planets had to push through far more material as they orbited, creating a drag that slowed them down. That began a long spiral toward the star’s core, and as the gas-giant planets migrated, they were stripped of their gas until only the rocky cores remained.

In the process, however, these planets also could have hastened the end of the star’s red-giant phase, the team suggests.

The star’s gravity is at its weakest in the outer reaches of the extended photosphere. As the planets migrated, their gravity could have stirred the star’s outer photosphere in ways that stripped the hot gas away.

There are other possible explanations for the planet-candidates’ presence. They could have been rocky planets to start with, were destroyed, and when the red-giant phase ended and the star’s photosphere contracted, they reformed from the torched leftovers, says Eliza Kempton, a scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who focuses her research on small extrasolar planets and was not part of the team.

Ironically, the team, which was led by French astronomer Stephane Charpinet of the University of Toulouse, didn’t set out to hunt for planets, Dr. Green explains. Instead, the scientists were using Kepler’s data to study stars – in particular, stars that had passed through their red-giant phase and had begun to burn the helium in their cores.

KIC 05807616 is one such star. Like many stars, KIC 05807616 varies in brightness in repeating patterns. These patterns can yield information on a star’s mass, temperature, size, even the structure of its interior.

Kepler measures such changes with high precision because of the requirements of its planet-hunting mission. It hunts for extrasolar planets by measuring how a planet slightly dims a star’s light when passing in front of it. But the scientists using its data need to be able to separate planet-induced dimming from a host star’s built-in swings in brightness.

As Dr. Charpinet’s team analyzed the varying brightness patterns from KIC 05807616, they detected two additional sets that didn’t mesh with the patterns from the star itself.

After carefully weighing other explanations, the most probable explanation left standing was the presence of two planets.

Not everyone is convinced that the team has detected planets, with some ready to go no farther than to describe planet patters as “intriguing modulations.” And while the team is confident that the objects are planets, they still formally dub them planet-candidates.

Whatever the answer, astrophysicists studying stars are as tickled to have Kepler on orbit as are planet-hunters. Compared with the tools available prior to Kepler’s launch, the quality of the data pouring in from the mission “is fantastic,” Green says.

By Pete Spotts

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Top 10 Countries Which Waste Most Food

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About one third of the food production has wasted annually all over the world in the year 2011. Most loss of food occurs during production in under developed countries, whereas in developed countries about 100 kilograms of food is waste at the consumption stage by each person in a year.

The cause for this may be biological, environmental, social and economical. It is also difficult to reduce the food waste produced by processing because while reducing we must see that it is reduced without affecting the quality of the finished product.

Over the past ten years, the Medias have done an exceptional job by covering the problems of world hunger. Most of us don’t even realize how many people in our own cities struggle hard every night to feed their families. The simple reason for this is, they don’t want their family members to sleep with empty stomach. The waste of food doesn’t just be limited to the grocery stores, instead this problem continues right into our kitchen and to our dinning tables.

While millions of people all around the world are struggling for two times of meals per day, tons of foods are being wasted by many people, primarily by the people of developed countries.

Based on OECD Environmental Data Compendium, here is a top 10 countries where most food is wasted:

United States of America:

United States of America

In a recent study conducted by the University of Arizona showed that around 40 to 50 percent of all food which is ready for harvest never gets ate. In the nation about 760 kilograms of food is wasted by each person in a year. The country spends about $1billion per year just to dispose the foods that are wasted. According to Environmental Protection Agency, food leftovers are the single-largest part of the waste flow by weight in the U.S. The food waste in the country includes uneaten food and food preparation scraps from residences, commercial establishments like restaurants, institutional cafeterias etc.

Australia:

Australia

Australians waste up to 3 million tons of food per year. From a research done by the Australia Institute showed that, Australians throwaway about $ 5.2 billion worth of food every year. This also includes $ 1.1 billion of fruit and vegetables. The estimates of the research showed that the average Australian household throws away $ 616 worth of food per year. About 690 kilograms of food is wasted by each person per year. According to Australian Bureau of Statistical Data, each Victorian household wastes more than $1000 worth of food every year and that is bringing the state’s annual food waste bill to $2.5 billion.

Denmark:

Denmark

In Denmark, the percentage of food wasted by Danes is 660 kilograms foe each person per year. The reasons for the waste of food are due to waste in households, catering centers etc. So, to stop wasting food by the Danes, A movement called ‘Stop wasting Food’ was conducted. The purpose of this movement was to fight against food waste and over-consuming. While there are about 6 million children in the world who are dying of hunger every year, every Danish citizen in average is throwing 63 kilos of good food every year. The movement also pointed upon the effects of food waste. Food waste is also very bad for the environment as it causes raise in CO2 emissions and that can play a main part in global warming.

Canada:

Canada

An enormous amount of food is wasted unnecessarily in Canada every year. This waste has turned out to be a negative impact on the country’s economy and environment. Majority of food is wasted in the country occurs to be from the consumer level. Every month, residents in the city of Toronto throw out 17.5 million of food. The waste of food in the country also comes from over production. In Toronto, each household produces about 275 kilos of food waste each year. In the country 51 percent of the food waste comes from the households, 18 percent of the waste has come from the packaging and processing and 11 percent of the waste comes from retail stores.

Norway:

Norway

In Norway, about 3, 35,000 tons of all the food being produced in Norway is ending as waste. Large amount of food waste is undesirable for environmental, ethical and economical reasons. The largest volumes of food waste in the country are found for fruits, vegetables and bakery products. Meat products have the largest impact on release of climate gases and economy. Most of the food is thrown out by consumers because it has expired. The food wasted by Norwegians is around 620 kilos of food per person every year.

Netherlands:

Netherlands

In Dutch households they throw away a lot of food. They waste of food in this country is approximately forty kilos per person every year. So to avoid this Wageningen UR Food and Biobased Research are finding ways to solve this problem in the nation. There are many strategies that are been developed and tests are carried out in a number of districts to persuade the Netherlands to throw away less food. In this country 610 kilos of food is wasted by each person every year.

Germany:

Germany

In Germany, food is thrown away by the bucket full of load while many people in other countries are dying of starvation. Around 20 million tons of food is thrown away in Germany each year, but there are no official statistics to confirm this number. In many supermarkets in the country, food is taken off from the shelf if it doesn’t look perfect, if there is no demand for it or the expiry date is over. For many years this problem of food waste was just being ignored. But now there’s a greater awareness, retailers and the Government of Germany have started looking for solutions. Around 540 kilos of food is wasted by every person each year.

United Kingdom:

United Kingdom

Food waste in the United Kingdom is a was a subject of environmental, economic and social concerns. It has got widespread media coverage and it has been getting varied responses from the government. The largest producer of food waste I the UK is the domestic household. Potatoes, Bread slices and apples are thrown away. Potatoes account for the largest quantity of avoidable food disposed of 359,000 tons per year, Bread slices is the second food type that is disposed in the country with the dispose rate of 328,000 tons per month. Salads is disposed in the greatest proportion, salads that are purchased are thrown away uneaten at most of the time. Around 560 kilos of food is wasted by each person every year.

Malaysia:

Malaysia

In Malaysia it is found that most of the food is wasted by urban households. These urban Malaysians throw away close to one million kilos of food from their kitchen every day. This figure is forty percent more than what businesses and industries discard in through out the nation. Bread and fruits are the other food products that end up in garbage bins among the most common edibles.

Finland:

Finland

Food waste in Finland’s restaurants and retail sector were both found out to be around half of the food waste created in the household levels in the country. Among the most wasted food in the country was of the vegetables, homemade food products, dairy products, bread etc. The main reason for food waste was because the food was spoiled, best before date was expired etc. These facts were found out by the MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Biotechnology and Food Research Sustainable Bioeconomy, and MTT Agrifood Research Finland, Economic Research.

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