Planetary Society Weekly Hangout: Studying Asteroids from Earth with Andy Rivkin

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2013/02/28 01:25 CST

Topics: podcasts and videos, asteroids, optical telescopes

Join Emily Lakdawalla for the Planetary Society's weekly hangout! Her guest this week was Applied Physics Laboratory asteroid astronomer and occasional musician Andy Rivkin. We talked about the menagerie of rocks in the asteroid belt, how many of them travel in pairs and triples, how some of them are surprisingly wet, and how much you can learn about asteroids using Earth-based telescopes.

ESO

Asteroid 4179 Toutatis as seen simultaneously from Paranal and La Silla

Two images of asteroid 4179 taken on September 29, 2004, at 02:30 UTC, when the asteroid was passing through the constellation of Triangulum Australe (the Southern Triangle) have been superimposed. The images were taken from two sites, La Silla and Paranal, demonstrating the effect of parallax.

Comments:

Gerald: 02/26/2013 11:31 CST

Can you tell a bit about asteroids with orbits around Lagrangian points (especially Earth-Sun) like 2010 TK7, or with horseshoe orbits like 2002 AA29; how stable are those orbits? I think, most people never heard about it. What is the state of a mission to one of those objects?

Bryan: 02/27/2013 06:54 CST

Can you discuss the implications of the potential comet impact of Mars in 2014? How might this affect the rovers/satellites? If its only a close pass(which is most likely) observational opportunities?

Andrew Planet: 02/28/2013 02:22 CST

How interesting, just yesterday on a Hubble telescope Google+ Hangout they were saying how land based telescopes were so much more behind in the quality of data we can presently obtain

Andrew Planet: 02/28/2013 03:32 CST

If the water on Earth came originally from comets in the early evolution of the solar system, does that mean that a Goldilocks zone also incorporates a standard trajectory of early comets in the possible habitable zone of a planet from its star?

Andrew Planet: 02/28/2013 03:42 CST

No matter where life's original organic seed came from, be it comets or not, the most important factor is in it propagating itself by the virtue of a Goldilocks habitable zone or environment.