Those flybys of cosmic flotsam this month within our little niche of astro turf — Asteroid 2007 TU24 and Asteroid 2007 WD5 — are a swift kick in the planetary defense pants. That is, there are some lessons learned left in the wake of their passage. Both are newly discovered Near Earth Objects (NEOs).

“The end of January twofer with NEOs flying by both Earth and Mars is wonderful!,” observed former Apollo astronaut, Russell Schweickart, now chairman of the B612 Foundation.

“Once again we’ve had an opportunity, prompted by nature, to think through the questions of what we would know and how we might react, were these objects actually headed for an impact…or even a very close call,” Schweickart told me.

Schweickart pointed out that WD5, in particular, being a small (Tunguska-sized) object, typifies the most frequent NEOs we will have to deal with.

“Deflection will often be out of the question due to the paucity of data we’ll have on them. Therefore, our actions will frequently be limited to providing short-term warning,” Schweickart added.

WD5 has generated some very useful discussions, Schweickart said. That particular space rock blasts by Mars on January 30.

“TU24, regrettably, has been more of a target of opportunity for scare mongers!,” Schweickart noted.

TU24 is on a freight train path, slipping by Earth on January 29. Its closest distance to Earth — roughly 334,000 miles (537,500 kilometers) — will be at 12:33 a.m. Pacific Time (3:33 a.m. Eastern time) in the United States. That’s close enough that the object should be observable that night by amateur astronomers glued to the eyepieces of modest-sized telescopes.

I also asked Donald Yeomans, an asteroid expert and Supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, about WD5’s orbit after it zips by the red planet.

“WD5’s orbit will be perturbed by the Mars close approach,” Yeomans said. “And while the nominal (most likely) orbit is not affected very much by the encounter, it will be difficult to follow thereafter because of the uncertainties introduced by the Mars perturbation,” he told me.

“WD5 is a near-Earth object and so will remain on our short list of objects that we monitor. Assuming we can get the necessary observations, we can track it years into the future,” Yeomans concluded.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 4:33 pm and is filed under History, Space & Astronomy, Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.