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asteroid

WHAT IF: An Asteroid Strike Brought a Years-Long Global Winter?

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Asteroid - pixabay

Every Wednesday, we’re asking a what-if question – how would our world be different if something were changed? Today’s question is from QSFer Scott: A huge asteroid just whizzed by us, and a new study shows a global winter snuffed out the dinosaurs (and most life) in about nine months. What if it happened today? How would we react? Live Science article: https://www.livescience.com/cretaceous-extinction-darkness Share your serious scientific analyses, your off-color jokes, and random thoughts on the topic on our FB and MeWe Groups: FB: http://bit.ly/1MvPABV MeWe: http://bit.ly/2mjg8lf

SPACE: Harvesting the Asteroids

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asteroid - pixabay

There’s gold in them thar asteroids! Literally — asteroids have more than enough gold, plus other metals, to provide a few lifetimes’ worth of fortunes. But there are plenty of other reasons asteroids are valuable. So how do we get these metals from these faraway asteroids? Perhaps the best way is to bring the space rocks to Earth. Most of the metals we use in our everyday lives are buried deep within Earth. And I mean deep: When our planet was still molten, almost all of the heavy metals sank to the core, which is pretty hard to get to. … Read more

SPACE: Asteroid Bennu Totally Won’t Hit Earth in 2035. Probably.

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Asteroid Bennu

An asteroid known as Bennu will pass within half the distance of the Earth to the Moon in the year 2135 but the probability of an impact with our planet in the coming centuries is very slight, scientists said Wednesday. OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft, spent two years near Bennu, an asteroid that is about 1,650 feet (500 meters) wide, observing its size, shape, mass and composition and monitoring its orbital trajectory around the sun. Using its robotic arm, the spacecraft also collected a sample from the surface of the asteroid that will help researchers determine the future trajectory of Bennu. … Read more

SPACE: There’s a Giant Asteroid Out There Somewhere

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Asteroid - pixabay

There’s a giant asteroid somewhere out in the solar system, and it hurled a big rock at Earth. The evidence for this mystery space rock comes from a diamond-studded meteor that exploded over Sudan in 2008. NASA had spotted the 9-ton (8,200 kilograms), 13-foot (4 meters) meteor heading toward the planet well before impact, and researchers showed up in the Sudanese desert to collect an unusually rich haul of remains. Now, a new study of one of those meteorites suggests that the meteor may have broken off of a giant asteroid — one more or less the size of the … Read more

SPACE: Did Mars Steal Our Second Moon?

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asteroid - pixabay

An asteroid trailing after Mars could actually be the stolen twin of our moon. The asteroid in question, called (101429) 1998 VF31, is part of a group of trojan asteroids sharing the orbit of Mars. Trojans are celestial bodies that fall into gravitationally balanced regions of space in the vicinity of other planets, located 60 degrees in front of and behind the planet. Most of the trojan asteroids we know about share Jupiter’s orbit, but other planets have them too, including Mars and Earth too. Full Story From Live Science

SPACE: NASA Just Snagged a Bit of Asteroid Rock to Bring Home (Hopefully)

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OSIRIS-REx at Bennu - NASA

For the first time ever, a NASA probe has performed a sample-snagging operation on an asteroid in deep space. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spiraled down to the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu Tuesday afternoon (Oct. 20) to grab material that mission team members hope harbors clues about the solar system’s early days and the rise of life on Earth. “We did it!” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, of the University of Arizona, said during a webcast that provided updates about the maneuver. “We tagged the surface of the asteroid, and it’s up to Bennu now to see how the … Read more

SCIENCE: Meteor That Killed the Dinosaurs Hit Planet at Worst Possible Angle

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Asteroid - pixabay

The flaming space rock that slammed into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, struck at the worst possible angle (for the dinosaurs, that is), new research suggests. Colliding with an enormous, fast-moving cosmic projectile would have been disastrous under just about any circumstances. But this giant space rock also hit the planet at a steep angle, causing the “deadliest possible” outcome by releasing much more gas and pulverized rock than it would have with a shallower approach, researchers recently discovered. Scientists modeled the path of the meteor as it hurtled toward Earth, creating the first 3D simulations to trace the … Read more

So… ‘Oumuamua Wasn’t Built By Aliens?

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'Oumuamua

Our solar system’s first known interstellar visitor may have a very violent origin story. The mysterious object ‘Oumuamua, which was spotted zooming through the inner solar system in October 2017, is probably a fragment of a larger body that was torn apart by gravitational forces during a close flyby of its native star, a new study suggests. This “tidal fragmentation scenario not only provides a way to form one single ‘Oumuamua but also accounts for the vast population of asteroid-like interstellar objects,” lead author Yun Zhang, of the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a … Read more

SPACE: Meet Arrokoth, the Most Distant Object Ever Explored

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Arrokoth - Live Science

Hopefully you weren’t too attached to “2014 MU69,” because the most distant object ever explored has a new name. The 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth, a term that means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language, mission team members announced today (Nov. 12). “The name ‘Arrokoth’ reflects the inspiration of looking to the skies and wondering about the stars and worlds beyond our own,” New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, said in a statement. “That desire to learn is … Read more

SCIENCE: Chesapeake Bay Asteroid Impact Created Wide Swath of Destruction

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About 35 million years ago, an asteroid traveling nearly 144,000 mph (231,000 km/h) smashed into the Atlantic Ocean near the modern-day town of Cape Charles, Virginia. The space rock vaporized instantly, but its impact triggered a gargantuan tsunami, cast up a monsoon of shattered rocks and molten glass that spanned hundreds of miles and carved out the single largest crater in the United States — the so-called Chesapeake Bay impact structure. Today, that 25-mile-wide (40 kilometers) crater is buried half a mile below the rocky basement of Chesapeake Bay — the 200-mile-long (320 km) estuary linking Virginia and Maryland on … Read more