In hopes of making it easier for future space missions to collect samples from asteroids and comets, NASA is working on a crazy space harpoon that will help make that happen. The issue with collecting samples from asteroids and comets aside from the fact that they are both moving fast and far away from Earth, is that they don’t command much gravity. This makes traditional approaches like the scoop or the shovel pretty much useless because they’ll push you right off the surface. An explosive powered space harpoon, on the other hand, can get the job done.

First things first: Earth is in no danger from mass extinction, or any Holly-wood style destruction. That said, the 90 foot wide Asteroid 2011 MD will pass within 7,430 miles of our home planet. For reference, that distance is about half the diameter of the Earth, and will be the fifth-closest observed approach an asteroid has made to the Earth.

In terms of speed and orbit, 2011 MD is actually quite similar to Earth. Because of this, the space rock intercepts our planet’s orbit every 13 years or so. The close fly-by and similar speeds mean that it would be an ideal candidate for ground-based viewing, but that won’t be so likely this time around. Unfortunately, the asteroid will pass on the sunlit side of the Earth, and likely be best observed with radio telescopes.

Though tomorrow’s close encounter will lack some drama, future encounters with 2011 MD could be far more interesting.  The swing by with Earth is going to put a crimp in the asteroid’s orbit, perhaps bringing it even closer next time around. Which wouldn’t be so bad considering that the diminutive asteroid would fizzle up in the atmosphere, making for quite a spectacular show.

(via Bad Astronomy)

In a modern era where a team of gamers (LoadingReadyRun) spend almost six straight days playing and webcasting the most boring game in the world (Desert Bus) and at the end of it raise more than $200,000 to give toys, games, books, and craft supplies to sick kids (Child’s Play), it’s good to remember that things have not always been so.

Which is not to say that gamers haven’t always had the same percentage of righteous and generous individuals, but just that the internet has not been available, and the young medium was even younger.  But that didn’t keep a few individuals from marching down to their arcade on January 2nd, 1981 and playing Asteroids until they’d raised enough money to pay for a local teen’s gravestone.

(via Reddit)

Redditor erikperik created a most excellent JavaScript bookmarklet that lets you turn any webpage into a playable game of Asteroids. And in this case, “playable” means “you can fly around blowing up HTML by shooting at it.” On longer, top-down pages, the ship even scrolls down with you.

Controls: (via erkie.github)

Steer with the arrow-keys.
Shoot with space.
To activate click the bookmark once on your webpage of choice.
Can’t see your remaining enemies? Then press and hold B

Click this link to commence blasting at Geekosystem, and bookmark it to use on any page.

(erkie.github via Waxy | Asteroids bookmarklet)

As in this time lapse of nuclear detonations worldwide, this video of asteroid discovery since 1980 starts off slow, but builds up serious momentum by the ’90s, corresponding with the rise of automated sky-scanning systems.

Twitter: As every hack comedian knows, it’s a medium that is exclusively used so people can tell each other what they just had for lunch. But developer and designer of “Internet-based things” Tom Taylor has found a simple, genuinely frightening use for the service: Alerting you whenever an object passes within 0.2 astronomical units, or 18.6 million miles, of Earth. This happens several times per week.

This beautiful chart, prepared by The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla, shows the comparative sizes of the four comets and nine asteroid systems that manmade spacecraft have gotten a good look at. As you can see, Lutetia, which was recently examined by Europe’s Rosetta space probe, is the biggest by a long shot, with a diameter of 130 kilometers.

Today in frightening science news: researchers at UC Santa Cruz and Los Alamos National Laboratory have determined that if a giant asteroid is headed towards Earth, even detonating a small nuclear bomb may not be enough to stop it. The reason? If the blast isn’t powerful enough, the asteroid fragments’ own gravity could pull all of the pieces back together, T-1000-style — in mere hours.

The Hubble Space Telescope may have just spotted the first collision between two asteroids ever detected by humans. Last week, scientists detected a mysterious X-shaped object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

No one really knows what this thing is yet, as it’s been displaying atypical behavior (Gizmodo won’t rule out the possibility that it’s a Klingon Bird of Prey), but the current theory is that two asteroids crashed into each other at more than 11,000 miles per hour: “Scientists think this nucleus is the surviving remnant of the collision, and the tail is the rubble left over from the crash.”

Also, dinosaurs may be involved, somehow: