S&T's Weekly Bulletin: Revolutionary Meteorite Find, The Remarkable Asteroid 2008 TC3

I received Sky & Telescope's Weeklly Bulletin and in it was this link to their article.
- LRK -
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Catch a Falling Star
The Remarkable Asteroid 2008 TC3
March 25, 2009
Last December a determined U.S. researcher traveled to Sudan to recover pieces of an asteroid that slammed into Earth's atmosphere only 19 hours after being spotted. It was a long shot that paid off beyond his wildest dreams.
> More at: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/newsblog/41873107.html
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Here are two paragraphs from the link above. You may want to look at the whole article.
- LRK -

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Catch a Falling Star:
The Remarkable Asteroid 2008 TC3
NEWS BLOG by Kelly Beatty

This week I'm in Houston for the 40th annual Lunar & Planetary Science Conference, where 1,500 researchers have gathered to talk shop about the solar system. And indeed the big space news this week involves high-stakes interplanetary events — but the story should be datelined "Almahata Sitta, Sudan" instead of "Houston, Texas."

Our saga begins a few months ago, when Planet Earth got an unprecedented visit from a small asteroid designated 2008 TC3. A telescopic observer atop Mount Lemmon, Arizona, discovered this incoming chunk of rock on October 6th, and it slammed into the atmosphere over northern Sudan just 19 hours later. Since the 1970s astronomers have tracked down thousands of asteroids that might someday strike Earth — this is the first discovery that actually did.
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NASA has posted many illustrations about these remarkable events here.
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/tc3/index.html

If you have access to the publication, "nature - International weekly journal of science" the findings are posted here.
- LRK -
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http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7237/abs/nature07920.html
/Nature/ *458*, 485-488 (26 March 2009) | doi:10.1038/nature07920; Received 6 February 2009; Accepted 20 February 2009
The impact and recovery of asteroid 2008 TC_3

P. Jenniskens1, M. H. Shaddad2, D. Numan2, S. Elsir3, A. M. Kudoda2, M. E. Zolensky4, L. Le4,5, G. A. Robinson4,5, J. M. Friedrich6,7, D. Rumble8, A. Steele8, S. R. Chesley9, A. Fitzsimmons10, S. Duddy10, H. H. Hsieh10, G. Ramsay11, P. G. Brown12, W. N. Edwards12, E. Tagliaferri13, M. B. Boslough14, R. E. Spalding14, R. Dantowitz15, M. Kozubal15, P. Pravec16, J. Borovicka16, Z. Charvat17, J. Vaubaillon18, J. Kuiper19, J. Albers1, J. L. Bishop1, R. L. Mancinelli1, S. A. Sandford20, S. N. Milam20, M. Nuevo20 & S. P. Worden20

In the absence of a firm link between individual meteorites and their asteroidal parent bodies, asteroids are typically characterized only by their light reflection properties, and grouped accordingly into classes1, 2, 3. On 6 October 2008, a small asteroid was discovered with a flat reflectance spectrum in the 554–995 nm wavelength range, and designated 2008 TC3 (refs 4–6). It subsequently hit the Earth. Because it exploded at 37 km altitude, no macroscopic fragments were expected to survive. Here we report that a dedicated search along the approach trajectory recovered 47 meteorites, fragments of a single body named Almahata Sitta, with a total mass of 3.95 kg. Analysis of one of these meteorites shows it to be an achondrite, a polymict ureilite, anomalous in its class: ultra-fine-grained and porous, with large carbonaceous grains. The combined asteroid and meteorite reflectance spectra identify the asteroid as F class3, now firmly linked to dark carbon-rich anomalous ureilites, a material so fragile it was not previously represented in meteorite collections.
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I seem to have missed the event last year.
Then again, I would have missed the one that is flying by today.
- LRK -

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http://www.spaceweather.com/
March 27, 2009

*ASTEROID FLYBY:* Asteroid 2009 FD is flying past Earth today less than 620,000 km (1.6 LD) away. There is no danger of a collision with the 160m-wide space rock, but it is close enough to photograph using backyard telescopes. Sunlight reflected from the surface of the asteroid makes it shine like a 13th magnitude star. Use this ephemeris to find it
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Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
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The Threat Of IMPACT - A Special Report on NEOs.

If you are a member of the National Space Society you probably just got the latest issue of adAstra - The Magazine Of The National Space Society.
The cover has the above title on it and several articles about NEOs.
Here is the link to the table of contents even though the article is not linked.
http://www.nss.org/adastra/volume20/v20n4.html

Since we have recently been buzzed by nearby passing asteroids I took time to read the articles.

There is an upcoming conference in Spain in April on Planetary Defense which goes along with previous questions about how would you go about getting to these NEOs, both for defense or possibly for commercial interests.
- LRK -

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http://www.congrex.nl/09c04/
1st IAA Planetary Defense Conference:
Protecting Earth from Asteroids
27 - 30 April 2009
Granada, Spain

The International Academy of Astronautics will hold its first conference on protecting our planet from impacts by asteroids and comets the week of April 27, 2009 in Granada, Spain. The 1st IAA Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids, co-sponsored by the European Space Agency and The Aerospace Corporation, is the follow-on to two previous planetary defense conferences held in 2004 in Los Angeles and 2007 in Washington, D.C. Details on the 2004 and 2007 conferences are at www.planetarydefense.info
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Sometimes in our looking up for incoming hazards we fail to look at what we are doing right at our feet.
We live here and throw our trash away and we are thinking of going to space where we throw more trash away.
Today in my email was a notice of the latest TED Talks postings and one of the videos is by Charles Moore and his sailing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks

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http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/capt_charles_moore_on_the_seas_of_plastic.html
Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch --
an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.
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BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/