![]() ![]() Previous Post Android Asks, Is Immortality Truly a Benefit? - Sci-fi Saturday “Extent” (2018) at DUST by Paul Michael Draper (August 9, 2021, 12:43 min) Time stands still as two old friends attempt to grapple with a question that defines their very existence. Mind Matters News Breaking and noteworthy news from the exciting world of natural and artificial intelligence at MindMatters.ai. You may also wish to read: Could huge chunks of asteroid gold wreck our economy? 16 Psyche’s gold illustrates how AI affects jobs. ![]() Meanwhile, there is this one:Īn asteroid lingers near Earth and devours time (13:23 min) Or, at any rate, it devours our perception of time, as one man discovers in “Flyby.” As the asteroid Chrono-7 hazes Earth, a man wakes up in the morning to find that he is living in his future, one he had never imagined. Maybe the possibility of an asteroid hit will generate more post-asteroid apocalypse sci-fi. An asteroid hit is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs and many other types of life forms 66 million years ago. NASA has catalogued 26,000 near-Earth asteroids so far. Meghan Bartels, “ Scientists fine-tune odds of asteroid Bennu hitting Earth through 2300 with NASA probe’s help” at (August 11, 2021)Ī paper discussing the Osiris Rex’s findings is open access. How precisely that dance plays out will shape Bennu’s trajectory over the next decades and centuries. In September of that year, Bennu will swing past Earth - not close enough that there’s any risk of an impact, but certainly close enough that Earth’s gravity could nudge the asteroid a bit on its path. However, despite the scientists’ best efforts, predicting Bennu’s course after 2135 is still tricky. That uncertainty remains even in the new and improved models of Bennu’s future path, but with the OSIRIS-REx observations, scientists were able to dramatically reduce their uncertainty about Bennu’s fate… Scientists’ models of asteroid trajectories always include some degree of uncertainty, since a multitude of forces tug at a space rock as it rattles around the inner solar system. Davide Farnocchia, study lead author OSIRIS-REx (formally known as Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and slipped into orbit around the asteroid Bennu in December 2018.The folks at aren’t terribly worried: "I think that, overall, the situation has improved." Precision counts I think that, overall, the situation has improved. "The impact probability went up just a little bit but it's not a significant change, the impact probability is pretty much the same," lead author Davide Farnocchia, who works at NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies in California, said during a news conference held Wednesday (Aug. And besides, the lessons the research offers for asteroid trajectory calculation could reduce concerns about potential impacts by other asteroids more than enough to compensate. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona) Technically, that's a small increase in risk, but the scientists behind the new research say they aren't worried about a potential impact. Related: NASA spacecraft leaves asteroid Bennu to bring pieces to Earth Read more: How OSIRIS-REx's team creates those asteroid Bennu photos An image of the asteroid Bennu produced by the OSIRIS-REx mission. While a slightly higher risk than past estimates, it represents a minuscule change in an already minuscule risk, NASA said. Estimates produced before OSIRIS-REx arrived at the space rock tallied the cumulative probability of a Bennu impact between the years 21 at 1 in 2,700, according to NASA. As a result, scientists behind new research now say they're confident that the asteroid's total impact probability through 2300 is just 1 in 1,750. ![]() And with that incredibly detailed view of the asteroid, experts studying potential space rock impacts with Earth have been able to fine-tune their existing models of Bennu's future. The agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent more than two years closely orbiting the space rock. ![]()
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