. . . The Daily Mail has checked it out and it’s nothing to worry about. The rumor did force NASA to respond with a non-denial denial. And a professor did say there’s a asteroid out there with our name on it. And a former astronaut did say we’ve just been lucky so far in […]
A cosmic mystery is uniting monks and scientists in Japan after a tree grown from a cherry stone that orbited the Earth for eight months bloomed years earlier than expected — and with very surprising flowers. The four-year-old sapling — grown from a cherry pit that spent time onboard the International Space Station (ISS) — […]
Spanish astronomers spotted a meteorite with a mass of about half a tonne crashing into the lunar surface last September. They say the collision would have generated a flash of light so bright that it would have been visible from Earth. … “This is the largest, brightest impact we have ever observed on the Moon,” […]
How would you change the course of an Earth-threatening asteroid? One possibility – a massive spacecraft that uses gravity as a towline – is illustrated in this artist’s vision (Dan Durda (FIAAA, B612 Foundation)) of a gravitational tractor in action. In the hypothetical scenario worked out in 2005 by Edward Lu and Stanley Love at […]
An asteroid half the size of a U.S. football field will pass between Earth and orbiting satellites next week, sparing the human race from the fate suffered by dinosaurs, NASA said. The 150-foot diameter asteroid, named 2012 DA14, will pass about 17,000 miles above Earth on Feb. 15 — lower than the orbits of some […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE / Credit: R. Evans & K. Stapelfeldt (JPL), WFPC2, HST, NASA] Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust pitter to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially as a bright meteor. Baseball-sized rocks and […]
The demise of the dinosaurs is the world’s ultimate whodunit. Was it a comet or asteroid impact? Volcanic eruptions? Climate change? In an attempt to resolve the issue, scientists at the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), the University of California, Berkeley, and universities in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have now determined the most precise […]
Deep Space Industries, Inc, announced plans to send a fleet of asteroid-prospecting to target asteroids in 2015 The first step in mining asteroids is to learn more about them. DSI aims to launch a fleet of FireFlies in 2015 to prospect promising near-Earth asteroids, determining properties such as their composition and spin rate. When Planetary […]
Last week the robotic Dawn spacecraft ended its year-long mission to asteroid Vesta, becoming the first spacecraft ever to visit this far off world located between Mars and Jupiter, in the Solar System’s main asteroid belt. … Vesta shows evidence of being a leftover from the early years of our Solar System, a building block […]
How would you change the course of an Earth-threatening asteroid? One idea – a massive spacecraft that uses gravity as a towline – is illustrated in this dramatic artist’s view of a gravitational tractor in action. In the hypothetical scenario worked out in 2005 by Edward Lu and Stanley Love at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, […]