stargazing

NASA says it can't yet afford to catch 2/3 of asteroids, potentially extinction level event causing threats. Spacepunks could help with this! What do we know about asteroid spotting and how can we contribute to this search?

At the moment, NASA has identified about five near-Earth objects that pose better than a 1-in-a-million risk of hitting Earth and being big enough to cause serious damage, Johnson said. That number changes from time to time, as new asteroids are added and old ones are removed as information is gathered on their orbits.

The space rocks astronomers are keeping a closest eye on are a 430-foot diameter object that has a 1-in-3,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2048 and a much-talked about asteroid, Apophis, which is twice that size and has a one-in-43,000 chance of hitting in 2036, 2037 or 2069.

Last month, NASA started a new Web site for the public to learn about threatening near-Earth objects.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32387796/ns/technology_and_science-space/

The Perseids meteor shower is coming this around this Tuesday evening so get your friends prepped and get ready to see some serious fire in the sky!

The Perseids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Swift-Tuttle. The Perseids are so called because the point they appear to come from, called theradiant, lies in the constellation Perseus. Meteor showers occur when Earth moves through a meteor stream. The stream in this case is called the Perseid cloud and it stretches along the orbit of the Comet Swift-Tuttle. The cloud consists of particles ejected by the comet as it passed by the Sun. Most of the dust in the cloud today is approximately a thousand years old. However, there is also a relatively young filament of dust in the stream that was pulled off the comet in 1862. The rate of meteors originating from this filament is much higher than for the older part of the stream.

Links to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perseids 

Instructions to view them: http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors