Writes NASA:

NASA Tele­vi­sion will pro­vide com­men­tary start­ing at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) on Fri­day, Feb. 15, dur­ing the close, but safe, fly­by of a small near-Earth aster­oid named 2012 DA14. NASA places a high pri­or­i­ty on track­ing aster­oids and pro­tect­ing our home plan­et from them. This fly­by will pro­vide a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close.

The half-hour broad­cast from NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Pasade­na, Calif., will incor­po­rate real-time ani­ma­tion to show the loca­tion of the aster­oid in rela­tion to Earth, along with live or near real-time views of the aster­oid from obser­va­to­ries in Aus­tralia, weath­er per­mit­ting.

At the time of its clos­est approach to Earth at approx­i­mate­ly 11:25 a.m. PST (2:25 p.m. EST / 19:25 UTC), the aster­oid will be about 17,150 miles (27,600 kilo­me­ters) above Earth­’s sur­face.

The com­men­tary will be avail­able via NASA TV and streamed live online at: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv and http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2

Or you can just watch above.…

Note: You can also watch footage of the mete­orite hit­ting Siberia this morn­ing here.

Prep­pers, it’s almost the big day you’ve been wait­ing for — the apoc­a­lypse and armaged­don all rolled into one. Almost, but not quite. Accord­ing to NASA, “an aster­oid about half the size of a foot­ball field will fly past Earth only 17,200 miles above our plan­et’s sur­face.” “This [will be] a record-set­ting close approach,” says Don Yeo­mans of NASA’s Near Earth Object Pro­gram at The Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry. “Since reg­u­lar sky sur­veys began in the 1990s, we’ve nev­er seen an object this big get so close to Earth.” It’ll be a close call and that’s all. So, prep­pers, keep your com­pass­es, iodine pills and dehy­drat­ed lentils packed and ready for anoth­er day. You’ll get your chance.

In 1996, sci­ence writer John Hor­gan pub­lished a book called The End of Sci­ence in which he claimed that we had learned all we could know about the nat­ur­al world. And in 2008, Wired mag­a­zine devot­ed an issue to, you guessed it, “The End of Sci­ence.” Snap­py, grandiose titles may sell copy, but it’s also the case that each time some­one or oth­er declares the end of some­thing massive—science, his­to­ry, war, and peri­od­i­cal­ly, the world–we can look back and be aston­ished at the hubris. It now seems that there are fron­tiers we are just begin­ning to explore, and they are the fron­tiers of our evo­lu­tion­ary begin­nings. While bio­physi­cists like Peter Hoff­mann chart the bound­aries between life and non­life at the mol­e­c­u­lar lev­el, NASA sci­en­tists explore the out­er reach­es to dis­cov­er what Leonard Nimoy, nar­ra­tor of the video above, calls “the very begin­ning of us.”

It’s a lit­tle wonky at times, but the short film above is nonethe­less a fas­ci­nat­ing overview of NASA’s Dawn mis­sion, a space­craft designed to col­lect data from the aster­oid belt. The ship itself is a mar­vel. Out­fit­ted with mas­sive solar pan­el wings that can pow­er it for years, Dawn con­verts xenon gas into plas­ma, which it pro­pels from its engine at speeds up to 78,000 miles per hour (or 21 miles per sec­ond) for max­i­mum accel­er­a­tion.

In fact, Dawn is the fastest ship NASA has ever launched. Even at top speeds, Dawn required four years to reach its first stop, the aster­oid Ves­ta, the bright­est aster­oid in the solar sys­tem and the only one vis­i­ble to the naked eye. Depart­ing Earth in 2007, the ship reached Ves­ta in July of 2011 and depart­ed last Sep­tem­ber for the aster­oid Ceres, which it will reach in Feb­ru­ary of 2015.

These two aster­oids are part of what is called the “pro­to­plan­e­tary disk,” a once-chaot­ic ring of dust and gas that began to coa­lesce into our solar sys­tem some 4.6 bil­lion years ago. One NASA sci­en­tist above describes the aster­oid belt as the “bone­yard” of deep space—remains from the ear­li­est epochs of time. Dawn’s mis­sion isn’t just a for­ay to unchart­ed space; it’s also a jour­ney bil­lions years into the past, into the ori­gins of our solar sys­tem.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Shat­ner Nar­rates Space Shut­tle Doc­u­men­tary

Star Trek Celebri­ties, William Shat­ner and Wil Wheaton, Nar­rate Mars Land­ing Videos for NASA

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian. He recent­ly com­plet­ed a dis­ser­ta­tion on land­scape, lit­er­a­ture, and labor.

Tak­en at the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion by astro­naut Aki Hoshide (Japan), this awe-inspir­ing self por­trait brings into one frame “the Sun, the Earth, two por­tions of a robot­ic arm, an astro­naut’s space­suit, the deep dark­ness of space, and the unusu­al cam­era tak­ing the pic­ture.” You’ll want to click the image above (or this link) to view the pic­ture dubbed “Orbit­ing Astro­naut Self-Por­trait” in a wor­thy larg­er for­mat.

Find oth­er self-por­traits tak­en in space here and here. And vis­it NASA’s Astron­o­my Pic­ture of the Day for more strik­ing images each and every day.

via @coudal

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