- #1
ErdosFan
- 2
- 0
The B612 Foundation,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B612_Foundation
http://b612foundation.org/
is a nonprofit composed of astronauts, scientists and engineers dedicated to the cause of developing a technological early warning system to detect distant asteroids that might be future dangerous NEOs within the next twenty or thirty years similar to or worse than the one that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia a few years ago.
It is easy to find asteroids that approach Earth from the Oort cloud/Kuiper belt regions that lie beyond the orbits of Mars or Jupiter. Even some amateur astronomers and various online citizen science grid computing projects have been doing this. But at present B612 has launched a donation campaign to raise about five hundred million dollars to launch an autonomous space telescope/probe into orbit between Earth and Venus, so that it can detect asteroids arriving from the "other side of the Sun", that is, moving past Mercury and Venus toward Earth, instead of past Jupiter and Mars toward Earth.
So my question is this: Is it feasible that such potential NEO asteroids (i.e., on the "other side of the Sun") moving past Mercury and Venus toward Earth instead of past Jupiter and Mars toward Earth, can be detected and photographed from the International Space Station?
Consider this hypothetical scenario: During a period of several weeks or months the ISS above the Earth could take a sequence of several photographs of the distant space around the Sun each time the ISS is on the night time side of the Earth's terminator. Would it be possible to use filters to block out the Sun's glare relative to the ISS during each sunrise when the photos are taken on the night side of the terminator and that helps a telescope take good pictures of distant stars and any possible distant NEO asteroids? If that is possible then these sequential photos that show distant bright objects on the other side of the Sun, later can be prepared to detect any asteroids that possibly might be moving in Earth's direction moving from the other side of the Sun (i.e., past Mercury/Venus/to Earth) but moving relative to the distant stars.
If such asteroid detection is possible from the ISS it could save several hundred millions of dollars of cost expenditures over the span of several years.
My background is graduate computer science/mathematics, not in physics/astronomy, except maybe for 20 physics credits or so I accumulated when I was an undergraduate. So I thought I should ask this question here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B612_Foundation
http://b612foundation.org/
is a nonprofit composed of astronauts, scientists and engineers dedicated to the cause of developing a technological early warning system to detect distant asteroids that might be future dangerous NEOs within the next twenty or thirty years similar to or worse than the one that hit Chelyabinsk, Russia a few years ago.
It is easy to find asteroids that approach Earth from the Oort cloud/Kuiper belt regions that lie beyond the orbits of Mars or Jupiter. Even some amateur astronomers and various online citizen science grid computing projects have been doing this. But at present B612 has launched a donation campaign to raise about five hundred million dollars to launch an autonomous space telescope/probe into orbit between Earth and Venus, so that it can detect asteroids arriving from the "other side of the Sun", that is, moving past Mercury and Venus toward Earth, instead of past Jupiter and Mars toward Earth.
So my question is this: Is it feasible that such potential NEO asteroids (i.e., on the "other side of the Sun") moving past Mercury and Venus toward Earth instead of past Jupiter and Mars toward Earth, can be detected and photographed from the International Space Station?
Consider this hypothetical scenario: During a period of several weeks or months the ISS above the Earth could take a sequence of several photographs of the distant space around the Sun each time the ISS is on the night time side of the Earth's terminator. Would it be possible to use filters to block out the Sun's glare relative to the ISS during each sunrise when the photos are taken on the night side of the terminator and that helps a telescope take good pictures of distant stars and any possible distant NEO asteroids? If that is possible then these sequential photos that show distant bright objects on the other side of the Sun, later can be prepared to detect any asteroids that possibly might be moving in Earth's direction moving from the other side of the Sun (i.e., past Mercury/Venus/to Earth) but moving relative to the distant stars.
If such asteroid detection is possible from the ISS it could save several hundred millions of dollars of cost expenditures over the span of several years.
My background is graduate computer science/mathematics, not in physics/astronomy, except maybe for 20 physics credits or so I accumulated when I was an undergraduate. So I thought I should ask this question here.