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Happy Asteroid Day! Prize-Winning Plan Focuses on Space Infrastructure

For decades, astronomers and policymakers have been working on plans to protect our planet from killer asteroids. But now there’s a new realm to protect: the thousands of satellites we’re putting in orbit.

And that’s just the start: Future off-world infrastructure, ranging from orbital fuel depots to moon bases, could be hit by asteroids, meteoroid storms or other threats from above.

A new proposal to identify such threats — and do something about them — has earned two researchers from the University of Edinburgh this year’s Schweickart Prize, which is named in honor of Apollo 9 astronaut (and planetary defense advocate) Rusty Schweickart.

“As human activity and vital interests rapidly expand into regions beyond the protective shield of our atmosphere, the number of passing objects capable of causing serious damage to both life and critical infrastructure increases dramatically,” Schweickart said today in a news release. “Our Schweickart Prize winners this year have called for a comprehensive and systematic examination of this emerging reality.”

University of Edinburgh researchers Brian Murphy and Richard Cannon are the winners of this year’s Schweickart Prize, which is named after Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.

The winners — Brian Murphy and Richard Cannon — are due to receive the prize at Lowell Observatory in Arizona on June 27. The Schweickart Prize is a B612 Foundation program that encourages graduate students to come up with fresh ideas aimed at defending our planet from near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Winners receive a $10,000 cash award as well as a museum-quality trophy with a meteorite on top.

Past prize-winners have proposed methods for spotting asteroids coming at us from a difficult-to-monitor zone between Earth and the sun, or for managing future risks associated with asteroid mining. This year’s winning proposal focuses on potential threats posed by streams of space grit, or by space rocks that are far smaller than your typical asteroid. As Schweickart noted, those cosmic bits would burn up in our atmosphere, but they can do a lot of damage in the vacuum of space.

Murphy and Cannon propose setting up an international commission to assess the threats to space infrastructure, in Earth orbit and beyond. That would lead to the creation of a coordinating body to build on the work currently being done to anticipate asteroid threats. The researchers call their proposed coordinating body “WARDEN,” which stands for Warning Network for Asset Resilience From Dusts, Ejecta and NEOs.

Murphy, whose research focuses on planetary defense missions and the composition of comets, said the idea for the proposal came to him in a dream.

“I had a very vivid dream that there was this meteoroid storm impacting Earth, and I woke up in the morning and said, ‘I need to check that out. Is this related to the Schweickart Prize? Could I submit this?’” he recalled. It didn’t take long for him to run the calculations and team up with Cannon, a fellow postgraduate researcher.

Satellite operators have long known that meteoroid storms can ruin their spacecraft. They typically reduce the risk through shielding, plus special maneuvers aimed at minimizing a satellite’s exposure during a predicted storm. But protective measures don’t always work. In 1993, meteoroids from the Perseid meteor shower are thought to have led to the demise of the European Space Agency’s Olympus 1 satellite. And scientists suspect that a Perseid meteoroid dealt a blow to the NASA/USGS Landsat 5 satellite in 2009.

Since 2009, the number of satellites in orbit has mushroomed from fewer than 1,000 to more than 17,000 — mostly due to the expansion of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. Murphy and Cannon estimate that the exposure to meteoroids has increased by a factor of 10 to 100, and that the risk will increase exponentially as more commercial ventures build out their satellite mega-constellations.

“Even when we had a hundredth of the assets in space, there was still damage that was in the $1.2 billion range,” Murphy said. “You can do the numbers for yourself there and say, all right, if we have 100 times that now, and potentially 1,000 times that in the next decade … this is going to be a big problem, and we need to start addressing that question now.”

In their proposal, Murphy and Cannon even lay out deadlines for doing something: “There are meteoroid storms coming back in 2028, 2033 and 2034 that historically have been damaging to spacecraft in the 1990s, as well as some of the biggest meteoroid storms ever recorded in the 1960s,” Murphy said. The 2028 event is predicted during the Perseids that August, while the potential storms in 2033 and 2034 are associated with November’s Leonid meteor shower.

Is the meteoroid threat on the radar for satellite ventures? The short answer appears to be yes, thanks in part to the fact that protective measures are already being taken to address the impact of satellite collisions in orbit. SpaceX, for example, equips its Starlink satellites with extra shielding — and it has a procedure for reducing a satellite’s exposure to impacts by flattening its solar panels.

The engineers at Starcloud, a Seattle-area space venture that eventually plans to launch tens of thousands of data center satellites, are also aware of the issue. “Right now we are very focused on the engineering for the first and second satellite, but it’s something we will put more time into as we build out the constellation,” Starcloud co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston said in an email.

Looking beyond Earth orbit, the WARDEN system that Murphy and Cannon propose would monitor potential threats to space infrastructure extending as far out as the moon. Last year, NASA reported that a building-sized asteroid known as 2024 YR4 had a small chance of hitting the moon in 2032. Ed Lu, executive director of the B612 Foundation’s Asteroid Institute, said an impact by an asteroid that large would result in a “pretty big explosion” and create a 2-kilometer-wide (1.2-mile-wide) crater.

NASA eventually ruled out an impact, but the episode served to illustrate the cosmic risks that future moon bases would have to contend with, perhaps starting in the 2030s. The risks could come not only from passing asteroids, but also from cometary fragments or the debris that’s blasted into space by future asteroid mining operations.

A chart from the prize-winning report points up hazards and space assets that would be covered by a new planetary defense initiative. (Credit: B. Murphy and R. Cannon via SchweickartPrize.org and B612 Foundation)

Murphy and Cannon argue that the international bodies currently tasked with monitoring potential asteroid threats to Earth — the International Asteroid Warning Network and the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group — aren’t well-positioned to focus on off-Earth threats. Murphy said adding WARDEN to the mix would “create a trifecta of planetary defense.”

“They all are checks and balances to each other, rather than two systems that could be at odds with planetary defense,” he said.

So, where does the proposal go from here? “The next step is, first of all, engaging with the expertise that is present,” Murphy said. “The primary way that we’ll go about that is through Richard Cannon, my co-author, as well as my network within the small-body community.”

Murphy and Cannon plan to use their $10,000 award to fund meetings that will result in the creation of the International Commission on Space Infrastructure Resilience, or ICSIR.

“Our first ICSIR meeting would be at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland,” Murphy said. “We want to have potential meetings of ICSIR roughly every six months following the first meeting, and really keep that momentum going, and also have an online presence for ICSIR.”

The way Murphy sees it, winning the prize is just the start of something far bigger. “We’re about to expand into the final frontier, further than we’ve ever gone before, and bring with us the critical infrastructure for our civilization,” he said. “So we simply must evolve planetary defense to protect that as well.”

All about Asteroid Day

Murphy and Cannon will discuss their proposal at 9 a.m. PT today during a live online event that’s open to the press and the public. Registration is available via SchweickartPrize.org.

The June 27 presentation of the trophy and the $10,000 award at Lowell Observatory is timed to coincide with an Asteroid Day celebration featuring Rusty Schweickart and fellow NASA astronauts. Check out the Asteroid Day Arizona website for the full program.

Three other Schweickart Prize proposals earned honorable mentions:

Heritage Auctions is conducting a sale featuring Apollo memorabilia from Rusty Schweickart, consigned by the B612 Foundation. B612 has also launched a separate auction of Schweickart memorabilia. Proceeds from both auctions will support the Schweickart Prize.

Founding sponsors of the Schweickart Prize program include Anousheh Ansari, Barringer Crater Company, Future Ventures, Geoffrey Notkin, Jurvetson Family Foundation, Meteor Crater Enterprises, Randy Schweickart and Michelle Heng, and Rusty B. Schweickart and Joanne Keys.

International Asteroid Day is observed annually on June 30 as a U.N.-sanctioned occasion aimed at raising public awareness about the risks of asteroid impacts. It commemorates the Tunguska explosion, a cosmic impact that destroyed half a million acres of Siberian forest land on June 30, 1908.

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Can We Steal Energy from Black Holes? Part 1: Leveling Up Spacetime

In 1969, Roger Penrose (yes, that Penrose, the one who would later win a Nobel Prize) worked out a way to steal energy from a black hole. It’s easy! Fly a spacecraft close to a spinning black hole, drop a payload at just the right angle, and you come back with more energy than you started with. The black hole gets slightly smaller. Nothing escapes the event horizon, no laws are broken, and yet the universe just handed you free energy.

Ah yes, the land of black holes, where nothing makes sense and everything we thought we knew turns out to be not quite right. But that’s okay. We’re going to take our time with this one. We’re going to unpack how the process works, why it doesn’t break any laws of physics, and hopefully, by the end, the universe will make a little more sense.

And to get started we need to introduce a rather beefy physics concept. It’s called frame dragging. It’s real, it’s fun, and most importantly, it’s what we’re here to talk about.

To get to frame dragging, we first need to change how we think about spacetime. We need to…level up.

The level 1 way most of us imagine space is basically Newton’s version: an empty stage. Objects sit in it, move through it, and exert forces on each other across it, but the space itself is a passive backdrop, a giant three-dimensional room that doesn’t care what’s inside. In this picture space has no properties of its own. It doesn’t stretch, it doesn’t push back, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just where stuff happens. It exists, and that’s enough for us to get physics done.

Of course, this level-1 picture was blown up by Einstein’s general relativity, which is our level 2 way of imagining space. Spacetime is not a passive stage. It’s a physical thing with a shape. Mass and energy bend that shape, and the bent shape is what we experience as gravity. Picture one seamless four-dimensional thing that can be stretched, curved, twisted, and, spoiler alert, dragged (not much of a spoiler, since I already told you this series is about frame dragging). Spacetime is an object in its own right, imbued with physical existence just like particles and forces and fields are. It’s dynamic. It’s alive.

A Horseshoe Einstein Ring, imaged by Hubble. The gravity of a foreground galaxy bends the spacetime around it, warping the light of a more distant galaxy into a near-perfect ring. Credit: NASA/ESA Hubble.

But that’s still only level-2 thinking. It’s good enough for most work in general relativity, but not for where we’re going today. So let’s move to level 3.

Because spacetime has shape and behavior, we can treat it as a kind of fluid. Now, this is going to be mostly analogy, but also not 100 percent. General relativity gives us a lot of freedom in how we describe spacetime and its interactions with matter. For example, you can imagine the space around a black hole as fixed, with things falling into it: eventually the gravity gets so strong, the walls of the well so steep, that nothing can escape. But you can also imagine that same space as flowing toward the black hole, like water into a sinkhole, and as you approach the event horizon space flows faster and faster, until you try to leave and find you have to push against a current moving faster than light. Two completely different pictures, but a single unified mathematical structure underneath. This happens all the time in physics, when we have equivalent descriptions of the same phenomenon. It’s just especially fun with general relativity.

Now, when I say let’s treat spacetime like a fluid, I don’t mean a real fluid made of molecules. I mean a substance with its own local geometry that responds to what mass and energy are doing inside it. When something moves through spacetime, it interacts with the geometry, like motion through water: you push the water, the water pushes back on you. It’s a two-way dialogue. And when something spins, it doesn’t just churn the air or the water around it. It churns the geometry of spacetime itself.

And churning fluids have a very curious property.

Think of stirring honey with a spoon. The honey right next to the spoon moves fastest. A little farther out, it rotates more slowly. Farther still, it barely moves at all. Just by rotating, the spoon has set up a slow, decaying swirl in the fluid around it.

General relativity says a spinning mass does exactly the same thing to spacetime. Spacetime itself picks up a slow rotation, strongest near the object, fading with distance. This is frame dragging: mass drags spacetime, and a spinning mass drags it in a rotational pattern.

In this level-3 view, spacetime is a fluid participant, not a stage. It has local flow. It responds to what mass is doing, and then it goes on to do its own thing. The part we care about is that spinning things generate swirls. There is genuinely a sense in which spacetime gets carried along by what’s inside it.

Of course, this is only a model to help guide us through the math, so let’s not get carried away. Spacetime is not made of anything the way the ocean is made of something. It isn’t molecules with pressure and viscosity. It has no temperature, it doesn’t slosh, and if you set up a swirl there’s no friction to slow it down over time. The swirl persists as long as the spinning source does. It’s a geometric effect, not a mechanical one.

But it is a real effect. Spacetime is real, it’s a thing, even though it’s only made of itself, and that thing responds to the motion of what’s inside it, and the response persists. Which means that even with all those caveats, our level-3 thinking is going to help us understand how we can pull energy out of black holes.

In Part 2, we track frame dragging down to an absurdly tiny number, and follow the decades-long effort to measure it right here at Earth.

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3 rescued belugas make 2,500-mile journey to SeaWorld San Diego

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Three rescued beluga whales have arrived at SeaWorld San Diego after traveling more than 2,500 miles from Canada following the closure of a marine park in Niagara Falls.

Ever since that Ontario park, Marineland, shuttered in 2024, there has been a scramble to find homes for 30 beluga whales who were once kept there. Described by SeaWorld as “an unprecedented international whale rescue effort,” the goal is to safely relocate the animals to suitable facilities, including aquariums and marine parks as far away as Atlanta and Valencia, Spain.

“Three more rescued belugas are safe,” SeaWorld posted on the social media site X on Saturday. Images shared along with that posting showed a large shipping container and a plane; a beluga suspended in a transport sling, with holes for its pectoral fins, over the container; a light gray beluga being hoisted through the air by a crane holding the sling; and a beluga swimming in water. The three belugas were transported to California on Saturday in a Qatar Airways Boeing 777 cargo plane.

The whales’ full health picture was still being assessed earlier this summer, but the relocation plan “was built, as much as possible, on understanding their overall health, social bonds and multiple other factors,” SeaWorld’s chief zoological officer, Dr. Chris Dold, said in a statement at the time. The three new arrivals will join SeaWorld San Diego’s other belugas, a roster that includes three other whales transported there from Marineland.

Steve Aibel, SeaWorld San Antonio’s vice president for animals and conservation, rode along for the first transport of six belugas in special cold-water-filled units earlier this year from Ontario to the Texas park and Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium. To date, whales have been transported both by air and truck.

“Seeing these first beluga whales arrive safely to their new homes is an important milestone, but it’s not the finish line,” Aibel said in the statement. “Our team is laser focused on supporting each whale through this transition with individualized care, patience and observation to ensure their welfare. We’re optimistic about what’s ahead, while recognizing that every animal will adapt on its own timeline.”

The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that park officials said they were not yet sure when the whales would be introduced to the public.

Eric Otjen, vice president of animals and conservation for SeaWorld San Diego, said the team there “is overjoyed to welcome the belugas to San Diego,” according to Fox 5 San Diego. “Our immediate focus is on Xavier, Cyprus, and Jasper’s health and wellbeing.”

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Fire Near Reno, Nev., Prompts Evacuations of Homes and Hospitals

The Hawk fire has burned over 13,000 acres and is encroaching on the northern part of the city. About 42,000 people are under formal evacuation orders and thousands more have been urged to flee.