Radio signals to know the interior of asteroids

Dec. 23 () –

An experiment to bounce radio signals off an asteroid will serve as a test to probe inside the asteroid Apophis when it passes us just 32,000 kilometers away in 2029.

The Gakona, Alaska High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) Research Center will transmit longwave signals to asteroid 2010 XC15 on December 27, which could be about 160 meters in diameter. The signal will be received by the University of New Mexico Long Wavelength Array near Socorro, New Mexico, and the Owens Valley Radio Observatory’s Long Wavelength Array near Bishop, California.

Mark Haynes, principal investigator for the project and a radar systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, explains it’s a statement: “The new thing we are trying to do is probe the interior of asteroids with long-wavelength radars and ground-based radio telescopes.” “The longer wavelengths can penetrate the interior of an object much better than the radio wavelengths used for communication.”

Knowing more about the interior of an asteroid, especially an asteroid large enough to do significant damage to Earth, is important in determining how to defend against it. “If you know the distribution of mass, you can make an impactor more effective, because you’ll know where to hit the asteroid a little better,” Haynes said.

HAARP will transmit a continuous chirp signal to asteroid 2010 XC15 at slightly above and below 9.6 megahertz. The chirp will repeat at two second intervals. The distance will be a challenge, Haynes explained, because the asteroid will be twice as far from Earth as the Moon.

The test in 2010 XC15 is one more step towards the encounter with the Apophis asteroid, scheduled for 2029 on a global scale. It follows tests in January and October in which the moon was the target of a HAARP signal bounce.

Apophis was discovered in 2004 and will make its closest approach to Earth on April 13, 2029, when it comes within 32,000 kilometers. Geostationary satellites orbit the Earth at about 36,000 kilometers. The asteroid, which NASA estimates is about 1,200 feet in diameter, was initially thought to pose a risk to Earth in 2068, but researchers have since better projected its orbit.

The 2010 XC15 test and the Apophis encounter in 2029 are of general interest to scientists studying NEOs. But planetary defense is also a key driver of the research. “The more time there is before a possible impact, the more options there are to try to deflect it,” Haynes said.

According to NASA, an asteroid the size of a car impacts Earth’s atmosphere about once a year, creating a fireball and burning up before reaching the surface.

About every 2,000 years, a meteoroid the size of a football field hits Earth. These can cause a lot of damage. And as for the destruction of civilization, NASA says that an object large enough to do so hits the planet once every few million years.

NASA managed to redirect an asteroid for the first time on September 26, when its Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, mission collided with Dimorphos. This asteroid is a moon in orbit of the larger asteroid Didymos. The DART collision altered the small moon’s orbit time by 33 minutes.

The December 27 test could reveal great potential for asteroid detection using long-wavelength radio signals. Approximately 80 known near-Earth asteroids passed between the Moon and Earth in 2019, most of them small and discovered near the closest approach.