Asteroids made easy: 'Patch of asteroid' being built inside a satellite

ASU researchers build their own "patch of asteroid" inside of a small spinning satellite seen here in this artist rendering. Credit: Sean Amidan

A dozen astronauts have walked on the moon, and several rovers have been piloted on Mars, giving us a good understanding of these off-world environments. But when it comes to asteroids, scientists enter uncharted territory.

Landing on an asteroid is notoriously difficult.

Asteroids have very little gravity because they have very little mass. Most of them appear to be rubble piles held together loosely, with surfaces covered in boulders and gravels and fine materials, much like the moon, but with a lot more cohesion. On an asteroid, a rock the size of a bank building weighs as much as a cricket on Earth, making an astronaut like a superman. But what would you anchor to, what you would land on and how would you move around?

Because scientists and engineers don't know the most basic mechanical properties of an asteroid, sending a billion dollar landing mission to an asteroid is risky, and even likely to fail, until some preliminary investigations are conducted, requiring years of lead time.

A team at Arizona State University is looking to mitigate that risk and improve that schedule by building its own "patch of asteroid" inside of a small, spinning satellite costing less than $100,000. The project is called the Asteroid Origins Satellite, or AOSAT I.

"Landing on asteroids is one of the biggest challenges of our time," roboticist Jekan Thanga said.

Thanga, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU, is the engineering principal investigator for AOSAT I. "And space agencies worldwide, including NASA, are very focused on meeting that challenge."

Erik Asphaug, a planetary scientist and professor at ASU, is the science principal investigator for AOSAT I. He and Thanga plan on launching a miniature satellite later this year that will serve as the world's first CubeSat microgravity laboratory. A CubeSat is a modular small satellite with a 10-by-10 centimeter base and various unit lengths. AOSAT I will be a 3U configuration, about the size of a loaf of bread, with two spun-up laboratories in the outer units, each housing a patch of real asteroid surface material.

In the first flight, one chamber will be filled to a depth of a few centimeters with very fine material representative of interstellar dust, or the fine "ponds" seen on several asteroids. 

The second chamber, otherwise identical, will be filled with bits of shock-fragmented chondrite meteorite material. Once launched into space and freely orbiting, these rocks will just tumble around -- itself an interesting experiment. But to build a realistic regolith surface for scientists to explore, the satellite is spun, to create microgravity-like conditions.

"We're taking asteroid material that landed on Earth and sending it back into space," Asphaug said. "It's a low-cost laboratory that really physically builds a patch of asteroid. It'll be asteroid gravity. It'll be made of asteroid stuff. We can do all sorts of experiments."

To simulate the gravity field of a 300-meter-diameter asteroid, AOSAT I spins once every 4.5 minutes. It can spin faster to reproduce the regolith (surface material) conditions for much larger asteroids. This spin configuration is easily attained and stabilized by off-the-shelf approaches, making it a great approach for students to learn on.

While much of the CubeSat is off-the-shelf, the approach is novel. CubeSats have typically been used to test engineering designs in space, since it is a really constrained and relatively new form factor. Great science has been performed on CubeSats, although this has only been observational so far. CubeSats have not yet been used to do "test tube and beaker-type" experiments of the sort that are planned for AOSAT I, Thanga said.

Experiments will be conducted robotically in the end chambers. When AOSAT I is not spinning, it is a zero-gravity capsule. Here, experiments will be done to understand how dust clumps together to form asteroids -- a process that plays out in zero gravity over long timescales. A simple robotic plunger is being designed to interact with the patch of regolith, and can be used to accrete a globule of particles, a miniature rubble pile asteroid that can be spun and shaken, observed by stereo cameras.

When AOSAT I starts to spin, these piles of grains will get accelerated to the outer walls. Observing that process will tell us much about nebular grain behavior and microgravity particle flows on asteroids, for example, following the formation of a crater.

Once the spinning AOSAT I has stabilized (once per few minutes), experiments will be conducted to give a better understanding of what asteroid surfaces are like. "The questions are very basic, and that's what makes this so much fun," says Asphaug. When you push slowly on a rock, does it lock into place or does it push aside the other rocks and slide into the surface? Do patterns form when you send a vibration through the regolith? Does cohesion dominate overwhelmingly over gravity, so that rocks stick together into aggregates? What happens when you charge the particles?

Asphaug and Thanga hope to answer these questions to help determine what kinds of devices would be best for landing on real asteroids. "An asteroid could just be lots of rock, just grouped together into this larger entity, but there's nothing holding it together," Thanga said. "So if something is going to grapple and try to land on this, there's nothing to grapple to."

Despite the small scale of the experiments (the asteroid patch will be slightly smaller than a CD case), Asphaug and Thanga are confident in the real-world applications of AOSAT.

"These rocks might not be able to tell the difference, whether they are in the AOSAT centrifuge or back on their home asteroid," says Asphaug. Once the AOSAT is spun up to mimic the gravity field of a ~300 m asteroid (gravity field 10-5 that of Earth), then it can be used to test mechanisms for asteroid landing. The first AOSAT will use a simple arm that does some basic interactions, while next generation AOSATs will be configured with more advanced robotic equipment.

Thanga uses the analogy of a wind tunnel to describe the scientific approach to their experiments. In a wind tunnel, researchers subject small-scale models of aircraft to conditions they expect in flight. The calculations and designs are then scaled up and applied to the real thing. "We can test asteroids in this wind tunnel-like analogous system, prove and disprove theories, and get a better understanding of our models," says Thanga.

Landing on an asteroid may be extremely difficult, but it's also an extremely desirable goal, from many points of view. Mining asteroids, colonizing asteroids or using asteroids as stepping stones to Mars and the other planets used to be the stuff of science fiction. Now it is on the desk of NASA administrators, who are being asked to find ways to divert hazardous asteroids, and to discover new ways to utilize asteroids, and to involve asteroids as part of the astronaut pathway to Mars.

Viranga Perera, a graduate student at ASU who is managing the project systems engineering, thinks it is "fascinating that this very low-cost AOSAT platform can be used to study such a fundamental concept as planetary accretion, and that it can serve as a test bed for future asteroid sample return missions."

The School of Earth and Space Exploration is an academic unit in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Source:  Arizona State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

The Scientists reconstruct ancient impact that dwarfs dinosaur-extinction blast

A graphical representation of the size of the asteroid thought to have killed the dinosaurs, and the crater it created, compared to an asteroid thought to have hit the Earth 3.26 billion years ago and the size of the crater it may have generated. A new study reveals the power and scale of the event some 3.26 billion years ago which scientists think created geological features found in a South African region known as the Barberton greenstone belt.
Credit: Image courtesy of American Geophysical Union

Picture this: A massive asteroid almost as wide as Rhode Island and about three to five times larger than the rock thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs slams into Earth. The collision punches a crater into the planet's crust that's nearly 500 kilometers (about 300 miles) across: greater than the distance from Washington, D.C. to New York City, and up to two and a half times larger in diameter than the hole formed by the dinosaur-killing asteroid. Seismic waves bigger than any recorded earthquakes shake the planet for about half an hour at any one location -- about six times longer than the huge earthquake that struck Japan three years ago. The impact also sets off tsunamis many times deeper than the one that followed the Japanese quake.

Although scientists had previously hypothesized enormous ancient impacts, much greater than the one that may have eliminated the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, now a new study reveals the power and scale of a cataclysmic event some 3.26 billion years ago which is thought to have created geological features found in a South African region known as the Barberton greenstone belt. The research has been accepted for publication in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The huge impactor -- between 37 and 58 kilometers (23 to 36 miles) wide -- collided with the planet at 20 kilometers per second (12 miles per second). The jolt, bigger than a 10.8 magnitude earthquake, propelled seismic waves hundreds of kilometers through Earth, breaking rocks and setting off other large earthquakes. Tsunamis thousands of meters deep -- far bigger than recent tsunamis generated by earthquakes -- swept across the oceans that covered most of Earth at that time.

"We knew it was big, but we didn't know how big," Donald Lowe, a geologist at Stanford University and a co-author of the study, said of the asteroid.

Lowe, who discovered telltale rock formations in the Barberton greenstone a decade ago, thought their structure smacked of an asteroid impact. The new research models for the first time how big the asteroid was and the effect it had on the planet, including the possible initiation of a more modern plate tectonic system that is seen in the region, according to Lowe.

The study marks the first time scientists have mapped in this way an impact that occurred more than 3 billion years ago, Lowe added, and is likely one of the first times anyone has modeled any impact that occurred during this period of Earth's evolution.

The impact would have been catastrophic to the surface environment. The smaller, dino-killing asteroid crash is estimated to have released more than a billion times more energy than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The more ancient hit now coming to light would have released much more energy, experts said.

The sky would have become red hot, the atmosphere would have been filled with dust and the tops of oceans would have boiled, the researchers said. The impact sent vaporized rock into the atmosphere, which encircled the globe and condensed into liquid droplets before solidifying and falling to the surface, according to the researchers.

The impact may have been one of dozens of huge asteroids that scientists think hit Earth during the tail end of the Late Heavy Bombardment period, a major period of impacts that occurred early in Earth's history -- around 3 billion to 4 billion years ago.

Many of the sites where these asteroids landed were destroyed by erosion, movement Earth's crust and other forces as Earth evolved, but geologists have found a handful of areas in South Africa, and Western Australia that still harbor evidence of these impacts that occurred between 3.23 billion and 3.47 billion years ago. The study's co-authors think the asteroid hit Earth thousands of kilometers away from the Barberton Greenstone Belt, although they can't pinpoint the exact location.

"We can't go to the impact sites. In order to better understand how big it was and its effect we need studies like this," said Lowe. Scientists must use the geological evidence of these impacts to piece together what happened to the Earth during this time, he said.

The study's findings have important implications for understanding the early Earth and how the planet formed. The impact may have disrupted Earth's crust and the tectonic regime that characterized the early planet, leading to the start of a more modern plate tectonic system, according to the paper's co-authors.
The pummeling the planet endured was "much larger than any ordinary earthquake," said Norman Sleep, a physicist at Stanford University and co-author of the study. He used physics, models, and knowledge about the formations in the Barberton greenstone belt, other earthquakes and other asteroid impact sites on Earth and the moon to calculate the strength and duration of the shaking that the asteroid produced. Using this information, Sleep recreated how waves traveled from the impact site to the Barberton greenstone belt and caused the geological formations.

The geological evidence found in the Barberton that the paper investigates indicates that the asteroid was "far larger than anything in the last billion years," said Jay Melosh, a professor at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, who was not involved in the research.

The Barberton greenstone belt is an area 100 kilometers (62 miles) long and 60 kilometers (37 miles) wide that sits east of Johannesburg near the border with Swaziland. It contains some of the oldest rocks on the planet.

The model provides evidence for the rock formations and crustal fractures that scientists have discovered in the Barberton greenstone belt, said Frank Kyte, a geologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study.

"This is providing significant support for the idea that the impact may have been responsible for this major shift in tectonics," he said.

Reconstructing the asteroid's impact could also help scientists better understand the conditions under which early life on the planet evolved, the paper's authors said. Along with altering Earth itself, the environmental changes triggered by the impact may have wiped out many microscopic organisms living on the developing planet, allowing other organisms to evolve, they said.

"We are trying to understand the forces that shaped our planet early in its evolution and the environments in which life evolved," Lowe said.

Source: American Geophysical Union