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, […]
You wake up one morning and discover that the only safeguard standing between you and impending death has been obliterated. Death is coming. It is relentless and swift. You have three weeks remaining. Suddenly, years lose their meaning. Every second counts. How will you spend them? This is the scenario constructed in Seeking a Friend […]
Who will protect us from a killer asteroid? A team of ex-NASA astronauts and scientists thinks it’s up to them. In a bold plan unveiled Thursday, the group wants to launch its own space telescope to spot and track small and mid-sized space rocks capable of wiping out a city or continent. With that information, […]
