Tag archives for impact
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Mars may have a really bad day next year on October 19th. That’s when there is a very slight chance a newly discovered comet may impact our neighboring planet, says NASA. Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) was discovered by Australian Robert H. McNaught, a prolific comet and asteroid hunter just two months ago and NASA’s Near-Earth…
This Friday asteroid 2012 DA14 will go down in the record books as the closest approach of an object of its size since astronomers began keeping records a few decades ago. Zipping past our planet closer than most orbiting communication and weather satellites, this office building sized chunk of rock should be visible to some…
Like the undead monsters in a Hollywood movie, some science theories just keep coming back to life. That’s been the case with solving the mystery surrounding the sudden disappearance 13,000 years ago of the Clovis – a Paleo-Indian North American culture. A popular theory keeps getting resurrected which fingers a comet impact in the Great…
Posted by News reports on comets have been dominated the past few days by NASA’s flyby yesterday morning of the comet 103P/Hartley 2 and the subsequent close-up pictures. Before the NASA craft got cozy, the comet made its closest approach by Earth on October 20, coming a mere 11 million miles (17.7 million kilometers) from our planet.…
Flattened cities, blankets of debris, earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, and shockwaves are just some of the ways a large asteroid impact could devastate life on Earth. Now add depleting the ozone layer to that list. A new model of asteroid smashes shows how a space rock plunging into the deep ocean would drastically alter atmospheric chemistry,…
Often in science, things get presented as facts, rules, and definitive statements. But part of the joy of science is that “facts” can be in flux, and rules are made to be broken. The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks each year in December, is one such rule-breaker. Unlike every other known meteor shower, the Geminids…
When you’re talking about a gas giant planet with rings, it’s often Saturn in the limelight. After all, you can see that planet’s bright disk of icy particles from Earth with just a modest telescope. But in 1979 the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw that Jupiter has rings too, albeit a much fainter system primarily made…
It’s been tough times for Jupiter: The gas giant planet lost a belt in May, and, thanks to the diligence of amateur astronomers, we know that it has been struck by space objects at least three times in the course of a year. Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley recorded the first impact in July 2009.…
“That’s no moon. Oh, wait, yes it is!” —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute When Luke said that TIE fighter was headed toward a “small moon,” he must have had Mimas on his mind. Since the 1980s this small Saturn moon has been likened to the fictional Death Star, thanks to its most noticeable blemish, the…
On October 9, 2009, a piece of launch rocket still attached to an orbiting spacecraft will finally let go so it can take a dive into the moon. The event is the end goal of NASA’s LCROSS mission, which aims to study material kicked up by the impact to find out whether the lunar surface…
—Image courtesy NASA Thankfully this is not a very odd sort of suppository. This is a squirrel monkey called Miss Baker, sitting in a NASA bio-capsule. On May 28, 1959, Miss Baker and a rhesus monkey named Able became the first primates to survive a trip into outer space. Both monkeys flew onboard a Jupiter…
It’s our closest neighbor in the solar system and the only one we’ve set human feet on so far. But there’s still plenty of mystery surrounding our orbital partner, the moon. —Image courtesy NASA Perhaps one of the biggest questions is why we have a lone natural satellite, and a pretty big one at that.…
As luck would have it, the weather just did not feel like playing nice with me today. I was super excited to see the rain clear up over Washington, D.C., this morning, and I got a couple nice peeks of tonight’s biggest full moon of the year as I was walking home. By the time…
Sometimes it’s possible to be too close to a problem. For example, how would a citizen of Whoville living on a speck of dust know what another speck of dust several light-years away is supposed to look like? The situation is much the same on Earth. Earth, as seen from Mars in 2004 —Image courtesy…
As anyone who’s recently cleaned their attic can tell you, unexpectedly finding a large spider sitting in a dark, hidden part of your home can elicit excitement, consternation, and sometimes a family squabble. Apparently it’s no different if you are a planetary scientist, even when the home in question is the solar system and the…
