NASA’s InSight lander may have ended its run on Mars, but the data it collected is still reverberating around the scientific community, not unlike the seismic waves it tracked within the red planet. After initially chalking a marsquake up to an asteroid impact, researchers now report that this massive quake …
Read More »NASA’s DART Mission
NASA has announced preliminary results from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos several weeks ago. Now, the mission is successful in more ways than one — NASA would have been happy with altering the space rock’s orbit by a few seconds, but …
Read More »We Might Be Able to Deflect an Asteroid by Sacrificing Satellites
Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop …
Read More »Deflect An Asteroid?
Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop …
Read More »Sacrificing Satellites
Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop …
Read More »Neotropical Rainforests
About 66 million years ago (the end of the Cretaceous period), a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that led …
Read More »Organic Matter And Water
An international team of scientists has studied both the water and organic contents from a dust particle recovered from the surface of the near-Earth S-type asteroid 25143 Itokawa by JAXA’s Hayabusa mission, which was the first mission that brought pristine asteroidal materials to Earth. The S-type asteroid Itokawa. Image credit: …
Read More »Almahata Sitta
The parent body of the Almahata Sitta meteorites — space rocks that rained down on the Nubian Desert in Sudan in 2008 — is a 640 to 1,800 km-wide water-rich asteroid that is as yet unknown, according to new research. Hamilton et al. studied the composition of Almahata Sitta 202 …
Read More »Asteroid Mission Samples
Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission wrapped up last week when the sample container parachuted down in Australia. The mission certainly looked like a success at every step along the way, but the true test is whether or not it collected the sample it flew out there to get. Today, the Japanese …
Read More »Bennu’s Regolith
On October 28, 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully stowed its Sample Return Capsule (SRC) with a sample of surface material from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. This image shows OSIRIS-REx’s collector head hovering over the Sample Return Capsule after the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism arm moved it into the proper position …
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