Today's space video of the day is a little shorter than most of the videos I've posted here lately. The video is taken from data producd by the NEAR-Shoemaker probe as it visited the asteroid 433 Eros. At the end of this video is a short animation depicting the landing sequence.
On April 13, 2029, the asteroid Apophis will have a close encounter with Earth - so close that it will actually dip below the orbits of our communications satellites. If it passes through a "keyhole" in space, then seven years later it will impact Earth, most likely somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, causing gigantic supersonic tidal waves. If it does turn out that Aphophis is going to hit us, then the earlier we start doing something about it - such as changing its velocity by as little as 1 centimeter per second - the easier it will be to prevent disaster. Of course, before we do anything, we need to know a lot more about the asteroid; in particular, we need to know its orbit much more precisely. Today's space video of the day is a simulation of a proposed mission to Apophis, lofted by a SpaceX Falcon1-E rocket in 2012.
Today's space video is an episode of Hyperspace starring Sam Neill. This episode deals with possible future asteroid impacts and is entitled Staying Alive.
Earlier today asteroid 2007TU24 passed by the Earth, and a bunch of uninformed people were freaking out. In today's space video of the day, Phil Plait sets them straight.
Today's space video of the day is a speech given by Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart to the Long Now foundation entitled The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 years.
