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SpaceNut, no topic contained NEO, so I'll launch this one with a status report on a NASA initiative to detect potential Earth threatening asteroids and comets:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/14/world/na … index.html
The project is moving forward ... launch date is reported to be 2026.
The observatory will concentrate on Infrared emissions from objects heated by the Sun.
(th)
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Such an observatory would offer a lot of useful side benefits. When I started on this board 3 years ago, I was interested in NEO mining and looked into plans for spinning them up to provide centrifugal gravity in internal tunnels. In hindsight, I wonder if such options are really cost-optimum, if our ultimate goal is to deliver materials for high Earth orbit manufacturing. But any plan for mining these objects must begin with finding them.
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #2 ... thanks for giving this new topic a running start!
Hopefully other forum members will contribute related news as they discover items that might fit.
I agree that the information collected for Planetary Defense ** should ** be equally valuable for business development.
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Shedding light on comet Chury's unexpected chemical complexity
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Shed … y_999.html
In addition to the identification of individual molecules, the researchers also carried out a detailed characterization of the full ensemble of complex organic molecules in comet Chury, allowing to put it into the larger Solar System context.
Parameters like the average sum formula of this organic material or the average bonding geometry of the carbon atoms in it are of importance for a broad scientific community, ranging from astronomers to Solar System scientists.
"It turned out that, on average, Chury's complex organics budget is identical to the soluble part of meteoritic organic matter", explains Hanni and adds: "Moreover, apart from the relative amount of hydrogen atoms, the molecular budget of Chury also strongly resembles the organic material raining down on Saturn from its innermost ring, as detected by the INMS mass spectrometer onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft".
"We do not only find similarities of the organic reservoirs in the Solar System, but many of Chury's organic molecules are also present in molecular clouds, the birthplaces of new stars", complements Prof. Dr. Susanne Wampfler, astrophysicist at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern and co-author of the publication.
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