Collaborate Disseminate
Space is very much the final frontier for humanity, at least as far as our current understanding of the universe takes us. Only a handful of countries and corporations on Earth have the hardware to readily get there, and even fewer are capable of reaching orbit. For these reasons, working …read more
Continue reading Fantastic Micrometeorites And Where To Find Them
Martian clouds could have an alien origin, according to a newly-published paper. The study suggests that mid-level clouds form above the Red Planet due to a phenomenon called “meteor smoke,” which occurs when space debris is shredded upon ent… Continue reading Martian clouds may be born of shredded meteorites
Apollo, a San Francisco-based startup that provides a number of developer and operator tools and services around the GraphQL query language, today announced that it has raised a $22 million growth funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Matrix Partners. Existing investors Trinity Ventures and Webb Investment Network also participated in this round. Today, Apollo […] Continue reading Apollo raises $22M for its GraphQL platform
The December 18 fireball created the biggest airburst since the Chelyabinsk meteor of 2013. Continue reading A Meteor More Powerful Than 10 Atomic Bombs Exploded Over the Bering Sea
According to ancient astronaut theorists, the lunar eclipse this weekend had an unexpected visitor. Right around the time of totality, a meteor crashed into the moon, and it was visible from Earth.
Meteors crash into the Earth and Moon all the time, although this usually happens either over the ocean (70% of the Earth) where we can’t see it, on the far side of the moon (~50% of the Moon) where we can’t see it, or on the sunlit side of the Moon (another, different 50%), where we can’t see it. These meteors range from the size of a grain …read more
Continue reading Amateur Astronomers Spot Meteorite Impact During Lunar Eclipse
NASA’s PMC Turbo mission captured new views of polar mesospheric clouds from a five-day balloon flight over the Arctic. Continue reading These Electric Blue Clouds Are Made from Ice Crystals and Meteor Debris
NASA’s PMC Turbo mission captured new views of polar mesospheric clouds from a five-day balloon flight over the Arctic. Continue reading These Electric Blue Clouds Are Made from Ice Crystals and Meteor Debris
It’s not hard to detect meteors: go outside on a clear night in a dark place and you’re bound to see one eventually. But visible light detection is limiting, and knowing that meteors leave a trail of ions means radio detection is possible. That’s what’s behind this attempt to map meteor trails using broadcast signals, which so far hasn’t yielded great results.
The fact that meteor trails reflect radio signals is well-known; hams use “meteor bounce” to make long-distance contacts all the time. And using commercial FM broadcast signals to map meteor activity isn’t new, either — we’ve covered the …read more
Continue reading Fail of the Week: Tracking Meteors with Weather Radio
NASA has been tracking bright meteoroids (“fireballs”) using a distributed network of video cameras pointed upwards. And while we usually think of NASA in the context of multi-bazillion dollar rocket ships, but this operation is clearly shoe-string. This is a hack worthy of Hackaday.
The basic idea is that with many wide-angle video cameras capturing the night sky, and a little bit of image processing, identifying meteoroids in the night sky should be fairly easy. When enough cameras capture the same meteoroid, one can use triangulation to back out the path of the meteoroid in 3D, estimate its mass, and …read more
We sometimes look back fondly on the old days where you could–it seems–pretty easily invent or discover something new. It probably didn’t seem so easy then, but there was a time when working out how to make a voltage divider or a capacitor was a big deal. Today–with a few notable exceptions–big discoveries require big science and big equipment and, of course, big budgets. This probably isn’t unique to our field, either. After all, [Clyde Tombaugh] discovered Pluto with a 13-inch telescope. But that was in 1930. Today, it would be fairly hard to find something new with a telescope …read more
Continue reading Citizen Scientist Radio Astronomy (and More): No Hardware Required
