Collaborate Disseminate
ESA has awarded €129.4 million of funding to the planetary defense mission Hera, which will observe the results of humanity’s first attempt to intentionally alter the orbit of a solar system asteroid. The mission could be the fist step along the road t… Continue reading ESA moves forward with Hera planetary defense mission
NASA has given the University of Colorado Boulder and Lockheed Martin the green light for the Janus mission, which will see a pair of small satellites launched in 2022 to study two pairs of binary asteroids. About the size of carry-on luggage and weigh… Continue reading First mission for close-up study of binary asteroids gets NASA go-ahead
That was a close shave! On Tuesday, asteroid 2011 ES4 passed really close to the earth. JPL’s close approach data pegs its nominal distance from earth at about 0.00081083276352288 au! Yeah, we had to look it up too: that’s around 75,000 miles (120,000 kilometers), just ten times the diameter of …read more
In the early morning hours of April 10th, a support cable at the Arecibo Observatory pulled lose from its mount and crashed through the face of the primary reflector below. Images taken from below the iconic 305 meter dish, made famous by films such as Contact and GoldenEye, show …read more
Continue reading Damage to Arecibo Leaves Gaping Hole in Astronomy
Astronomers have identified an asteroid that’s just made the closest pass to Earth ever recorded – and it was only spotted after it had passed. The object skimmed Earth’s atmosphere over the weekend, close enough to have its orbit changed by the planet… Continue reading Astronomers spot closest Earth-buzzing asteroid ever recorded
Most meteorites that fall to Earth belong to one of two broad groups – there are rocky ones, and there are metallic ones that were once molten iron. But one puzzling group of meteorites appears to belong to both camps at once, and now scientists have d… Continue reading Mysterious meteorites came from an asteroid with a liquid metal core
Over the last few weeks the media has been full of talk about NEOWISE, one of the brightest and most spectacular comets to ever pass through our solar system that you can still see if you hurry. While the excitement over this interstellar traveler is more than justified, it’s also …read more
Continue reading The WISE in NEOWISE: How a Hibernating Satellite Awoke to Discover the Comet
Earth is a famously watery planet, but where exactly it all came from is a mystery. Now, researchers in Japan have suggested a new origin story, by showing that water – and petroleum – can form inside clouds of organic matter, at high temperatures and … Continue reading Interstellar organic matter might be a major source of Earth’s water
As NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft homes in on Bennu ahead of its sample collection later this year, the probe is continuing to reveal fascinating insights about the attributes of the primitive asteroid. Mission scientists are now reporting a long-suspect… Continue reading Close inspection of asteroid Bennu reveals rocks cracking from sunlight
The exact nature of the bizarre interstellar object ‘Oumuamua remains a mystery. There’s been no shortage of ideas, but now astronomers at Yale and the University of Chicago have proposed that it’s a brand new type of object: a hydrogen iceberg.Continu… Continue reading New theory proposes ‘Oumuamua is an interstellar hydrogen iceberg