As it turns out, space technology research isn’t just for astronauts and NASAscientists. A new local event has a way for creative types to develop innovations that could potentially be disruptive here on earth and in outer space.
The Space Health Innovation Challenge, a new “hackathon” taking place Feb. 7 – 9 at the BioScience Research Collaborative at Houston’s Rice University, is inviting all creative innovators and entrepreneurs to come together and take on some of NASA Johnson Space Center’s greatest challenges. The hope is that designers, developers, doctors and others will form a dialog with Houston’s space community, and this joint community will get the ball rolling on developing new innovations for both space and earth.
NASA, which isn’t formally affiliated with the event but provided the challenges that event attendees will try to tackle, has publicly expressed its need to prove its relevance amid massive budget cuts. At JSC, executives previously told the Houston Business Journal that the local center will focus on partnering with community members to commercialize its technologies and show that human space exploration is beneficial to today’s society.
Brian Lang, chapter head of Health 2.0 Houston, which sponsors the hackathon with Enventure, said he hopes the event will bring together the space and startup communities.
“There is a robust ecosystem when it come to innovators in the space community — I didn’t realize how big it is,” Lang said. “But you don’t see them in the startup world. We want to introduce startups to innovators who want to commercialize research at JSC.”
Many of the challenges at the hackathon involve health since JSC has a large focus on human wellness in space. However, most of the challenges also involve data visualization and communication technologies, such as an improved wireless network. Ideal solutions to these challenges should be applicable in outer space and on earth.
“I think it’s critical that people understand that there needs to be multiple stakeholders (for innovations),” said Dorit Donoviel, deputy chief scientist and industry forum lead for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which is an event sponsor. “It will be hard for a product created just for NASA to survive. But the fun thing about creating a product for space is you have to think differently. You have to think more creatively about the world around you, and that may spur some interesting concepts.”
Teams that work on the challenges have a chance to win office hours with JSC and NSBRI staff as well as membership to Brightwork CoResearch, a local research space.
“At the end of the day, it would be great to have some ideas that we could actually use and develop,” Donoviel said. “We as an organization have some funding we can award to someone who wants to develop a good idea. But it comes down to execution. We want someone to pick up and run with the ball.”
NASA is inviting the public to help astronomers discover embryonic planetary systems hidden among data from the agency’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission through a new website, DiskDetective.org.
Disk Detective is NASA’s largest crowdsourcing project whose primary goal is to produce publishable scientific results. It exemplifies a new commitment to crowdsourcing and open data by the United States government.
“Through Disk Detective, volunteers will help the astronomical community discover new planetary nurseries that will become future targets for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope,” said James Garvin, the chief scientist for NASA Goddard’s Sciences and Exploration Directorate.
WISE was designed to survey the entire sky at infrared wavelengths. From a perch in Earth orbit, the spacecraft completed two scans of the entire sky between 2010 and 2011. It took detailed measurements on more than 745 million objects, representing the most comprehensive survey of the sky at mid-infrared wavelengths currently available.
Astronomers have used computers to search this haystack of data for planet-forming environments and narrowed the field to about a half-million sources that shine brightly in the infrared, indicating they may be “needles”: dust-rich disks that are absorbing their star’s light and reradiating it as heat.
“Planets form and grow within disks of gas, dust and icy grains that surround young stars, but many details about the process still elude us,” said Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “We need more examples of planet-forming habitats to better understand how planets grow and mature.”
But galaxies, interstellar dust clouds, and asteroids also glow in the infrared, which stymies automated efforts to identify planetary habitats. There may be thousands of nascent solar systems in the WISE data, but the only way to know for sure is to inspect each source by eye, which poses a monumental challenge.
Public participation in scientific research is a type of crowdsourcing known as citizen science. It allows the public to make critical contributions to the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics by collecting, analyzing and sharing a wide range of data. NASA uses citizen science to engage the public in problem-solving.
Kuchner recognized the spotting of planetary nurseries as a perfect opportunity for crowdsourcing. He arranged for NASA to team up with the Zooniverse, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop and manage citizen science projects on the Internet. The result of their combined effort is Disk Detective.
Disk Detective incorporates images from WISE and other sky surveys in brief animations the website calls flip books. Volunteers view a flip book and classify the object based on simple criteria, such as whether the image is round or includes multiple objects. By collecting this information, astronomers will be able to assess which sources should be explored in greater detail, for example, to search for planets outside our solar system.
“Disk Detective’s simple and engaging interface allows volunteers from all over the world to participate in cutting-edge astronomy research that wouldn’t even be possible without their efforts,” said Laura Whyte, director of citizen science at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Ill., a founding partner of the Zooniverse collaboration.
The project aims to find two types of developing planetary environments. The first, known as a young stellar object disk, typically is less than 5 million years old, contains large quantities of gas, and often is found in or near young star clusters. For comparison, our own solar system is 4.6 billion years old. The second planetary environment, known as a debris disk, tends to be older than 5 million years, possesses little or no gas, and contains belts of rocky or icy debris that resemble the asteroid and Kuiper belts found in our own solar system. Vega and Fomalhaut, two of the brightest stars in the sky, host debris disks.
WISE was shut down in 2011 after its primary mission was completed. But in September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), and given a new mission, which is to assist NASA’s efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs). NEOWISE also can assist in characterizing previously detected asteroids that could be considered potential targets for future exploration missions.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., manages and operates WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. The WISE mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, which manages JPL for NASA.
For more information about Disk Detective, please visit:
Herbig-Haro 30 is the prototype of a gas-rich young stellar object disk. The dark disk spans 40 billion miles in this image, cutting the bright nebula in two and blocking the central star from direct view. Volunteers can help astronomers find more disks like this through DiskDetective.org.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA/C. Burrows (STScI)
Debris disks, such as this one around the bright star Fomalhaut, tend to be older than 5 million years, possess little or no gas, and contain belts of rocky or icy debris that resemble the asteroid and Kuiper belts found in our own solar system. The radial streaks are scattered starlight.
Marc Kuchner, the principal investigator for DiskDetective.org (left) and James Garvin, the chief scientist for NASA Goddard’s Sciences and Exploration Directorate, discuss the crowdsourcing project in front of the hyperwall at Goddard’s Science Visualization Lab.
Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/David Friedlander
SAN FRANCISCO – The Smart Tech Foundation is calling on the tech community to solve one of America’s most pervasive and tragic problems — gun violence.
It is posing four $1 million challenges to motivate entrepreneurs to apply their talent and ingenuity towards reducing gun death and injury.
The Smart Tech Foundation is a response to the Sandy Hook shootings. This tragedy shook the nation on Dec. 14, 2012, and yet we have made little-to-no progress to address the problem — 12,000 people have been killed by guns since Sandy Hook, including 573 children and teens.The U.S. saw 23 mass shootings in 2013.
The mission of the Smart Tech Foundation is to hack through all the politics and bureaucracy and inspire progress through entrepreneurial solutions. It was started by Ron Conway, a famed angel investor known for advocating the use of technology to address civic issues, along with serial entrepreneur Jim Pitkow
“Let’s use innovation to bring about gun safety and not rely on Washington,” Conway said at the kickoff event for the firearm safety challenge. “The tech community wasn’t engaged with this issue before, but the Sandy Hook massacre should cause people to act. We are innovators, and we want entrepreneurs to invent ideas about gun safety.”
Conway compared this effort to the invention of the seat belt. He said that Volvo created the three-point safety belt, and that created a market for safety in automobiles. Since then, driving is seven times safer on a per mile basis, and he said a market solution like this could have the same impact on gun safety.
“We believe in the free market and the democratic process,” Pitkow said, who serves as director of Smart Tech. “This is about examining the current realities of gun violence and the systematic market failures in terms of innovation and active capital. This is not about gun control. In no way do our efforts challenge the right to bear arms. We are calling upon brightest minds in world to create opt-in solutions that strengthen the rights of gun bearing citizens and increase the safety of Americans.”
The foundation is accepting applications starting today through March 31, 2014, and candidates at all stages of “technological readiness” can apply, meaning you can have just an idea or a product already in the market. A panel will review the proposals and allocate the funds to the most promising ideas. The goal is to provide structure and focus to these entrepreneurs as well as access to experts, money, tools, and any other resources they might need.
A few companies already developing products to promote gun safety attended the event today as examples of what technology can do.
Armatix built a radio-controlled watch that restricts gun access and use. This “smart system” means the gun can only shoot if it is in range of the watch or if the gun owner releases the safety mechanism by entering a PIN code. If the gun loses contact with the watch, it automatically deactivates.
Everlokt is working on Safe Access Ammunition (SAAMO) technology. It makes ammunition as well as computerized gun handles that limits who can fire the guns. Salus Security Devices built a biometric locking station for guns that recognizes fingerprints, and Sentinel built an “Identilock” mechanism that covers the firearm trigger until a fingerprint unlocks the device.
Sentinel founder Omer Kiyani was shot when he was 16 in a drive-by shooting while he was out with his friends.
“I am a gun owner, I am a parent, and I am a victim,” he said. “I remember seeing the fear in my parents’ faces that day. I never ever want to see a child go through something or have a parent go through the same thing. As a responsible American, I am passionate about solving the gun violence issue — it is not bigger than American ingenuity.”
Ben Tomb is the CEO of Salus Security Devices. When his son was 5, he was playing with his friend next door.
“He went to his friend Bobby’s house to play. Bobby’s older brother, who was 12, went into the father’s bedroom, retrieved his shotgun, and accidentally or intentionally discharged it, fatally wounding Bobby, who died the next day. I know that could have been my son or one of my grandsons.”
Despite all this tragedy, gun control remains a divisive political issue. It can’t make any headway in Congress, and the real threats and dangers too often become mired in partisan bickering. In the mean time, tens of thousands of people are dying.
“We believe through innovation, new products can be introduced in firearm safety to make communities safer and save lives,” said San Francisco police chief Greg Suhr. “Those who say ‘Guns don’t kill people. People kills people’ are mistaken. Guns do kill people. We need better gun control, and to date efforts in D.C. have not been successful, but there is more than one way to skin a cat.”
The first challenge is dedicated to firearm safety. The subsequent challenges are dedicated to big data, community safety, and brain health.
Sergey Khaibrakhmanov was sleeping when he heard the explosion. Startled, his heart already pounding, he jumped awake in bed. What the hell was that?
It was loud, whatever it was, enough to shake the apartment and scare him half to death. Did a plane just crash?
He edged to the side of his bed as debris sprinkled from the ceiling, speckles of dust and plastic tile, falling like snow in sporadic, sluggish patterns. The silence, eerily juxtaposed against the bang, was ominous, unreal even. His ears began to ring.
A breeze whistled inside from the direction of the balcony. The glass door — or what was left of it — lay in broken pieces on the carpet, sparkling like a tiny sea of diamonds. Shit.
Trying not to step on the shards with his bare feet, he climbed through the gaping frame and peered into the sky.
“I saw this enormous white trail. Big. Impressively big, like a cloud,” he says. “I knew it was too large to have belonged to a plane.”
A large trail left behind from a meteor explosion above Chelyabinsk, Russia, on Feb. 15, 2013
IMAGE: SERGEY KHAIBRAKHMANOV
The meteor was small, about 18 meters around, with an estimated mass of 13,000 metric tons. It entered Earth’s atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour, close to 60 times the speed of sound.
Cruising 14 miles above the ground, it exploded with the energy equivalent to 500 kilotons of TNT. The explosion was 30 times brighter than the sun, and created a shock wave that damaged some 7,000 buildings under its path. The spewing energy injured more than 1,400 people, most claiming harm from broken glass, like Khaibrakhmanov’s, which flew in from their windows after the explosion. Some were knocked off their feet; others suffered severe skin burns from the sheer brightness of the explosion.
In a library in Yemanzhelinsk, a town 30 miles south, a shattered window framestruck and cracked a statue of Pushkin. Witnesses in both the city and surrounding countryside say the area smelled like gunpowder for days.
In many ways, the explosion was a wake-up call, an unmistakeable message that the skies are filled with thousands of potential catastrophes-in-waiting. Furthermore, we don’t employ hundreds of people to monitor for space rocks around the clock. Often our fate lies in the hands of amateur observers and research teams, some of which staff teams of eight or fewer.
Even so, the Chelyabinsk space rock did arrive at a crucial moment in technology. Scientists are discovering new ways to identify near-Earth objects (NEOs), just like Chelyabinsk, every day.
The main problem is politics regarding the funding and overall priority of NEO-tracking: whether better asteroid telescopes are worth the investment over, say, exploratory missions to Mars. The conflicts make it difficult to move forward.
One group is even choosing to bypass government funding all together. It aims to crowdsource funding for a space telescope that would hunt approaching rocks from an Earth-like orbit around the sun. Other inventors are designing technologies to deflect approaching rocks, one of which would use a spacecraft’s gravitational pull to nudge an asteroid off its course.
While specifics about asteroid tracking and prevention continue to be fuzzy, the lingering question remains: When it’s our entire civilization at risk, is it better to be safe than really, really sorry?
Stephen Larson, a senior staff scientist at the Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona, has been tracking asteroids since 2004.
The program, funded by NASA, uses three telescopes in the mountains north of Tucson to survey the sky each night, from dusk to dawn. Their focus is to catalogue existing rocks, with a specific emphasis on NEOs en route to the planet. To date, they’ve located more than 6,000 NEOs, about two-thirds of all such objects discovered.
“The idea for this started in the mid-nineties, primarily from the understanding that the crater off the coast of Yucatán Peninsula is what remains of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs,” Larson says.
“This has always been a potential hazard. But now technology is at the point where we can actually find objects in the sky in an efficient way.”
His staff is small: eight full-time employees and two part-timers, a modest number for a group that’s essentially in charge of patrolling the skies for Earth-ending surprises. Larson, in particular, speaks in a laid-back tone that seems unnervingly out of place, especially when he employs phrases like “devastating impact” or “society at stake.”
A 0.7-meter angle Schmidt survey telescope, used by Larson’s team at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz.
IMAGE: STEPHEN LARSON
Each night, one of Larson’s observers selects a region of the sky to survey, looking for the clearest sections based on clouds and other weather conditions. He then chooses the brightest star, nicknamed the “catalogue reference star,” to ensure that the telescope is pointed properly.
Over the course of 10 minutes, the observer takes four or five still images, then runs them through a special software that filters out any objects previously recorded. 10 minutes is a good interval to detect motion, Larson says. The computer looks for objects that change locations in a straight line throughout the photo series: “It has to be moving the same way, the same direction, to be considered an asteroid,” he says.
Images that fit the bill are flagged and sent back to the observer, who gives final confirmation and then checks for NEOs — the best indication being fast-moving objects, as they’re likely closer to the Earth’s surface.
The Catalina Sky Survey sends the results to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Cambridge, Mass., at the end of each night. There, the staff uses software that generates an orbit based on the data from Larson’s team.
Using a complex system of calculations, they’re able to predict orbits and determine years in advance — sometimes hundreds of years — if a rock is on a potential collision course with Earth
Using a complex system of calculations, they’re able to predict orbits and determine years in advance — sometimes hundreds of years — if a rock is on a potential collision course with Earth. Every finding is saved and documented, both digitally and on DVD, and posted on the group’s website.
“The calculations we use — they’re pretty advanced,” Tim Spahr, director of MPC, says with a laugh. “We receive these distances and velocities, then use them to estimate an orbit. We’ve compressed the equations into our software, so all I really have to do is push a button with a bunch of code and wait for it to bark something out at me.”
On the day of the Chelyabinsk strike, the team was actually eyeing a different asteroid. A year prior, an observatory in Granada, Spain, had located a 30-meter-wide object called ”367943 Duende” moving along a suspicious orbit closing in on Earth. After a few days of calculations, MPC determined it would pass by the planet safely.
A year went by and, when the time came, it flew by as planned. Anyone still nervous about it breathed a sigh of relief. Sixteen hours later, when the Chelyabinsk meteor struck Russia without warning, Duende was as good as forgotten.
Larson’s Catalina program, along with four other surveys, began with $4 million per year of NASA funding in the early 2000s as part of the Near Earth Object Observation (NEOO) project. At the time, the team searched for asteroids 1 kilometer around and larger, thought to have the ability to wipe out entire populations and drastically affect the food chain upon impact.
An artist’s interpretation of a narrow asteroid belt orbiting a star
IMAGE: NASA/JPL-CALTECH
“Objects even 100 meters around could destroy an entire city,” Larson says. “But those that are 1 kilometer and larger … those would have global consequences.”
Currently, NASA claims to have catalogued more than 90% of the asteroids and comets larger than 1 kilometer (or 0.6 miles) across, most of which live in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. If any were on-course for Earth, they’d know.
The really small asteroids — ones that enter the Earth’s atmosphere every day and burn into dust by the time they reach the surface — are almost never noticed, let alone detected.
Chelyabinsk-sized objects fall somewhere in the middle. They’re big enough to do damage but still small enough to slide under the radar.
Location plays a factor, too. The Chelyabinsk asteroid came from the direction of the sun, which blinded any telescopes that might have otherwise detected it
In 2005, as part of the NASA Authorization Act, the Senate enacted the George E. Brown Law to target objects 140 meters around and larger. Now, the targets are even broader, in part because so many large asteroids have already been discovered, he says, but also because his team has realized the possibility for destruction if smaller rocks, Chelyabinsk-sized and similar, hit the planet without warning.
In 2008, an observer detected a four-meter asteroid named “TC3” near the orbit of the moon. Larson’s team sent the observation to MPC.
Luckily, the rock entered the atmosphere and exploded above a desolate region of the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan (now North Sudan), as predicted.
The rock was too small to have caused much significant damage, Larson says, even if it had hit a more inhabited area. The explosion broke the asteroid into small-sized chunks by the time it hit the surface. Still, a raining shower of rocks on, say, the crowded streets of Manhattan wouldn’t be pretty. Residents would have been notified to take cover.
“Early Wednesday morning (Jan. 1, 2014) … the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz., collected a single track of observations with an immediate follow-up on what was possibly a very small asteroid — 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in size — on a potential impact trajectory with Earth.”
Larson says the most concerning detail about TC3 was actually the explosion. Like Chelyabinsk, TC3’s fireball was noticeable from the ground. Had it exploded over a region of conflict — near the border of Pakistan and India, for example — it could have been wrongly perceived as an attack.
“If it happens over the wrong area, there’d be big problems,” Larson says. “These small impacts, like Chelyabinsk, they don’t happen very often. But they can cause so much destruction when they do. We’d be irresponsible not to look for them.”
An artist’s interpretation of an asteroid breaking apart
IMAGE: NASA
It was just after 9:20 a.m. in Chelyabinsk when the shock wave hit. The city, with a population of just over a million people, sits in the Ural Mountains region near the border of Europe and Asia. In the winter months, given its northern latitude, the sun rises late in the morning. On that day, Khaibrakhmanov remembers, the bang was almost in sync with the breaking of dawn.
From his balcony, he cursed the glass cuts in his feet and stared onto the street. Nearly every window, in his building and the adjacent ones, was shattered. A group of neighbors stood on the sidewalk below — some dressed in coats, scarves and wool caps; some still wearing pajamas — while others cautiously peeked their heads out their front doors and window frames. Everyone, he says, looked to the sky.
A zinc factory with a collapsed roof in Chelyabinsk on Feb. 16, 2013
IMAGE: LAURA MILLS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Khaibrakhmanov (pronoucned hai-brah-man-of), 26, is a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at Chelyabinsk State University.
“After the shock of it all had settled, I remember thinking, ‘Maybe this was a meteor,’” he says. “But at the time, nobody where I was knew what had happened.”
He was sure of one thing: Despite the sun having barely risen, he was definitely awake. And he had questions.
An artist’s interpretation of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft and the asteroid Vesta
IMAGE: NASA
“A lot of people think my job sounds like science fiction. And, yeah, I guess it kind of is.”
Ed Lu, a former astronaut who lived aboard the ISS for six months, is CEO and founder of the B612 Foundation, an asteroid-tracking group that, since 2012, has raised funds with the hope of building the world’s first orbiting telescope.
It’s an ambitious but necessary plan, Lu argues. While ground telescopes are good stepping stones, they’re just not covering all the areas that need to be monitored. Their primary weakness is visibility. In the case of Chelyabinsk, it was the sun’s rays that prohibited anyone — even Larson’s team — from seeing the rock before it had already entered the atmosphere. It’s those kind of rocks Lu hopes to catch.
The $250 million ship his team is designing, which they’re calling “The Sentinel,” will be equipped with a high-powered scope and infrared lens. The idea is to send it on an orbit around the sun at a distance similar to that of Venus, meaning one round-trip would last approximately seven months. Having that vantage point will allow it to track NEOs from a closer proximity, with the sun at its back at all times.
“Asteroids are very faint. They’re like pieces of black charcoal flying in a black sky,” he says. “In order to really see them, you need to have a space-based eye like this that travels with the sun behind it.”
Lu says the craft will be able to find 200,000 NEOs, both large and small, within its first year alone, far past the current ground telescope record of about 1,000 per year.
“There are millions of them out there. To find all of them, how we’re currently operating, would take thousands of years. But most asteroids change orbits slightly every 100 years — so at that pace, we’re never actually caught up.”
An asteroid that we think is safe now, then, might be a threat for our great-great-great-grandkids. But there’s time to figure it out, he says — so long as we act soon.
An asteroid that we think is safe now, then, might be a threat for our great-great-great-grandkids. But there’s time to figure it out, he says — so long as we act soon.
The official launch isn’t slated until July 2018. Until then, Lu says the group will continue to raise funds and finalize the ship’s design. Although Lu is a former employee of NASA, the project is being funded entirely by donors. It’s the first deep space mission of its kind to be conducted in the private sector, he says. A spokesperson for the group declined to release how much money they’ve currently raised.
NEOCam has a mission similar to B612. This group, led by Amy Mainzer, Ph.D., was recently funded by NASA for technology development.
Its goal is also to build a space telescope, packed with an infrared lens and wide-field camera, that will orbit close to Earth — not Venus — and monitor the area for NEOs. If launched, it will carry out a four-year baseline survey to track down two-thirds of NEOs in the 140-meter-wide range. Additionally, it will use infrared imaging channels to measure NEOs’ composition and shapes.
“As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft travels to its next destination, this mosaic synthesizes some of the best views the spacecraft had of the giant asteroid Vesta.”
According to the group’s website, the project is making and testing new detectors for its ship that help “meet the rigorous requirements of spaceflight.” The team says it will repropose the project to NASA’s next call for Discovery proposals, hopefully by 2015.
“Finding these smaller-sized NEOs is absolutely critical to the future of the earth,” Lu says. “This is the only natural disaster we know how to prevent. Shame on us if we don’t do this.”
Dr. Ed Lu sits second from left at the National Security Affairs, U.S. Naval War College Subcommittee on Science and Space hearing on space threats risks/solutions, on March 20, 2013.
IMAGE: DOUGLAS GRAHAM/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES
Ultimately, if we do find an approaching rock with enough time to act, what do we do? The Hollywood notion of explosives (see: Armageddon) seems dangerous by most standards. Blowing something into smithereens without changing its course only means those smithereens will hit its target, instead of the big object — still just as, if not more, dangerous.
Other ideas propose nudging dangerous asteroids away from Earth. In 2005, Lu co-published a study on an asteroid-deflecting technique called “gravity phasing.” The study hypothesized that a spacecraft be sent to an Earth-bound asteroid well ahead of its impact, hover above it and over time, the craft would pull the asteroid off its course using nothing more than the gravitational attraction between both bodies.
Larson says other proposals have talked about using nuclear explosives to alter the course of an asteroid. Instead of detonating a bomb on the surface, these would instead create an explosion off to the side, in hopes to vaporize the surface of the NEO and cause a thrust to move it off its Earth-bound course.
In August 2013, NASA released details about a ”big bag” method, which would capture rocks using a giant bag attached to a spacecraft — sort of like catching a butterfly in a net. Details are pretty slim at the moment. According to the proposal, the cutting edge technology (the bag) is still in development, but the purpose of this mission is to capture a rock, pull it into orbit around the moon, then study its composition. In emergency situations, then, it probably wouldn’t be the best option.
Larson says the NEOO might be funded at $40 million in 2014, but they’re still waiting on a final decision from the program director based on an evaluation by a peer review panel
Larson says the NEOO might be funded at $40 million in 2014, but they’re still waiting on a final decision from the program director based on an evaluation by a peer review panel.
“The survey telescopes we’re currently using were originally designed for other things, but they’ve been monitored the best they can for NEO-tracking,” he says. “But stronger cameras, ones that are tailored with this sole purpose in mind, would allow us to view larger areas at a time. We just need more money to make that happen.”
He’s proposed new surveillance instruments in the southern hemisphere. There’s also talk of building NEO-tracking telescopes in Russia and France.
Nothing has been set in action just yet. Without the urgent knowledge of an approaching NEO — a larger one that, say, we’d have several years to act on — it’s a lower priority stance compared to other missions, Larson says.
Recent and Notable Meteors
But that’s not to say it isn’t being discussed at all. Just last week, Spahr met with the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space to talk about a potential “International Asteroid Warning Network.” In short, the group would serve as a communication network across the world’s largest space programs. Members throughout various countries would act as liaisons between scientists and the public.
“This is still in it’s early stage. And I mean early, like infancy stage,” Spahr says.
Spahr emphasizes that it wouldn’t serve as an alert team. If there was an emergency — say, an asteroid was headed toward London, estimated to impact in 24 hours — it would still be up to the city to alert its residents and determine an evacuation plan. The warning network would just ensure all the needed information was delivered.
“If anything, this might help alter the public’s perception about NEOs, in a good way,” he says. “The more seriously people take them — or just the more people who are aware of them and the risk — the better.”
A 1.5-meter survey telescope on Mount Lemmon, near Tucson, Ariz.
IMAGE: STEPHEN LARSON
Khaibrakhmanov was excited when he learned the explosion was, in fact, the result of a meteor. He walked through his neighborhood for 40 minutes, without an intact window pane in sight. By then, videos of the meteor, captured from dash cams and cellphones, had already gone viral.
Several shops in the city started selling souvenirs of the asteroid, including a specialty themed candy bar still available today. A sign outside one store now reads: “Nothing keeps your spirit up better than a meteor in the morning.” A memorial statue of the asteroid is said to be in the works, too.
“Ask anyone from Chelyabinsk and they’ll tell you a warning would have been nice,” says Khaibrakhmanov.
Chelyabinsk may have slipped through our fingers, but that doesn’t mean future asteroids have to. Larson, for the most part, is remaining cool about it. He’s not trying to invoke fear by doing what he does, just awareness. Maybe a little appreciation for the universe, too.
“This can be a big problem. We don’t consider the next big impact as an if, but as a when,” he says. “Hopefully it will be well into the future.”
Online portal features information on government challenges and competitions, aims to crowdsource creative ideas to solve societal problems.
The General Services Administration’s (GSA)Challenge.gov online portal for running challenge and prize competitions has won Harvard University’s Innovations in American Government Award. GSA was chosen as a front-runner of the prestigious award from a pool of more than 600 applicants.
Challenge.gov was launched in July 2010 in response to a memo by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) instructing the GSA to build a platform that allows the public to compete for prizes by “providing the government with novel solutions to tough problems,” the GSA said. Challenge.gov uses a pay-for-performance model and allows the government to crowdsource such solutions in a contest format. The contest site is powered by a platform called ChallengePost.
Between Sept. 2010 and Sept. 2013, 58 federal agencies used Challenge.gov to run 288 competitions, according to the GSA. The competitions encompass everything from science to engineering to design, resulting in many cases in public-private partnerships. “Prizes and challenges are being integrated into the fabric of the way we do business in government,” White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) director John Holdren said at an event honoring GSA on Jan. 23.
Some examples of contests on Challenge.gov include Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Robocall Challenge aimed at blocking auto-dialing telemarketers. FTC picked two winners, each of whom received $25,000 for their proposals for technology to intercept and filter out robocalls. The Labor Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) launched the Disability Employment App Challenge, calling on entrepreneurs and developers to use ODEP’s publicly available data to create apps that assist disabled job seekers. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Michelle Obama used Challenge.gov to create the Apps for Healthy Kids Challenge, which focuses on engaging software tools and games for children.
Challenges, contests and prizes will become a bigger part of how agencies develop solutions to their problems, according to federal officials.
GSA announced Jan. 23 it was selected as the winner of the Innovations in American Government Award by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University for its work developing the contest and award platform Challenge.gov.
John Holdren, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at the event challenges allow agencies to pay only for results outside of the traditional procurement process.
“Prizes and challenges are being integrated into the fabric of how we do business in the government,” Holdren said. Agencies across government are crafting additional guidance to help spur the use of challenges, he said.
“Agencies need to keep seeking new ways to use prizes as tools to advance their missions and help solve the great challenges facing societies today,” Holdren said.
Agencies have used Challenge.gov to support more than 300 contests and have drawn 42,000 participants and 3.6 million visits to the website, according to GSA.
Some of the challenges included:
■ A 2009 award by NASA to anyone who could develop a more flexible astronaut glove capable of performing a wide array of tasks in the vacuum of space.
■ A contest to see who can build the best app to help track personal financial issues that led to the development of an app to track and pay for student loans.
■ An ongoing challenge from the Health and Human Services Department to develop a model to predict future influenza outbreaks based on publicly available data.
Dan Tangherlini, GSA administrator, said he sees the first 300 challenges as a baseline for future efforts and evidence for agencies that they can use Challenge.gov to help solve a broad range of problems.
“It’s a fantastic way of really changing the way we go to market and ask for problems to be solved,” Tangherlini said.
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – Jason Kessler, the man in charge of NASA’s asteroid grand challenge, is in Huntsville this week talking about how humans avoid the suspected fate of the dinosaurs: extinction by asteroid strike. Kessler will be speaking to the Rocket City Science Cafe tonight and at the University of Alabama in Huntsville Wednesday afternoon.
A NASA “grand challenge” is a call for people everywhere to get involved in helping solve a big-picture issue facing the agency, the nation or the world. Finding killer asteroids and stopping them before they hit Earth qualifies.
NASA says the world’s scientists have located 95 percent of the near-Earth “civilization killer” asteroids 1 kilometer in size or larger. But that still leaves unaccounted for an estimated 90 percent of asteroids between 100 meters and 300 meters across and 99 percent of asteroids smaller than 100 meters. The estimated size of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia last year with the force of 40 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, has fluctuated as scientists refine their picture of it, but is thought to closer to 50 meters wide than than 100 meters wide.
Challenge-Driven Open Innovation 