Space and astronomy news
Our Solar System is a collection of objects from planets and moons to comets and asteroids. It’s thought there are upwards of 1 million asteroids orbiting the Sun and it was thought that any water present on them should have evaporate long ago. A recent study using data from the SOFIA infrared telescope discovered water on the asteroids Iris and Massalia.
Continue reading “Water Found on the Surface of an Asteroid”
In several billion years, our Sun will become a white dwarf. What will happen to Jupiter and Saturn when the Sun transitions to become a stellar remnant? Life could go on, though the giant planets will likely drift further away from the Sun.
Continue reading “Webb Directly Images Two Planets Orbiting White Dwarfs”
By discovering two interstellar objects (ISOs), we know that asteroids and comets from other star systems pass through the Solar System from time to time. By inference, some of these must have crashed into the Moon, creating impact craters. If we could study the impact sites, we might be able to learn about the star systems that they came from.
A new paper suggests there could be a way to determine which lunar craters came from interstellar object impacts. The authors say that young, small craters with high-melt volume near the Moon’s equator are likely the best candidates for ISO-generated craters on the lunar surface.
Continue reading “Some of the Moon's Craters are From Interstellar Impacts. Can We Tell Which?”
In about one year from now, the European Space Agency will launch its Hera mission. Its destination is the asteroid Didymos, and it’ll be the second human spacecraft to visit the 390-meter chunk of rock. NASA’s DART mission crashed a kinetic impactor into Didymos’ tiny moonlet Dimorphos as a test of planetary defence.
Hera will perform a follow-up investigation of the binary asteroid to measure the size and morphology of the impact crater on Dimorphos. To help it along, it’s taking two tiny CubeSats that will land on Dimorphos.
Continue reading “ESA’s Hera Mission is Bringing Two Cubesats Along. They’ll Be Landing on Dimorphos”
The ESA’s Gaia mission is releasing a new tranche of astronomical data. The mission has released three regular, massive hauls of data since it launched in 2013, named Gaia DR1, DR2, and DR3. The ESA is calling this one a ‘focused product release,’ and while it’s smaller than the previous three releases, it’s still impactful.
Continue reading “A Huge New Gaia Data Release: More Stars, Gravitational Lenses and Asteroids”
The OSIRIS-REx mission has just completed NASA’s first sample-return mission from a near-Earth asteroid (NEA). The samples arrived at the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) near Salt Lake City, where a team of engineers arrived by helicopter to retrieve the sample capsule. The samples will be curated by NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate (ARES) and Japan’s Extraterrestrial Sample Curation Center (ESCuC). Analysis of the rocks and dust obtained from Bennu is expected to provide new insight into the formation and evolution of the Solar System.
Continue reading “The OSIRIS-REx Capsule Has Landed! Asteroid Samples Returned!”
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft launched almost one year ago, in October of 2021. Its journey is an ambitious one, and long. It’ll visit eight different asteroids in its planned 12-year mission. Two of them are main belt asteroids, and the other six are Jupiter Trojans, which share the gas giant’s orbit around the Sun.
Lucy’s first, and smallest, target asteroid is now in the spacecraft’s sights.
Continue reading “Lucy Has its First Asteroid Target in the Crosshairs”
After NASA’s DART mission slammed into asteroid Dimorphous in September 2022, scientists determined the impact caused tons of rock to be ejected from the small asteroid’s surface. But more importantly, DART’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbital period, decreasing it by about 33 minutes.
However, a group of researchers measured the orbital period about a month later and discovered that it had increased to 34 minutes — 1 minute longer than the first measurements. Even though it was a single impact from DART, some force continued to slow the asteroid’s orbit, and astronomers don’t yet know what that mechanism might be.
Continue reading “DART Had a Surprising Impact on its Target”
Asteroids come in many shapes and sizes. Most are spherical, though many have a feature that can make them difficult to land on – they are essentially just collections of rocks loosely bound together by gravity. In space exploration jargon, they are known as “rubble piles.” Many of the asteroids humanity has visited are considered rubble piles, including Itokawa and Dimorphos, the destinations for Hayabusa and DART, respectively. But, as the trials of the Philae spacecraft showed when it tried to meet up with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, landing on these objects with very low surface gravity can be difficult. Enter a new concept from researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Their idea, known as Area-of-Effect Softbots (AoES), could help future asteroid explorers, and even miners, overcome some of the challenges facing them at these small bodies.
Continue reading “Engineers Design a Robot That Can Stick To, Crawl Along, and Sail Around Rubble Pile Asteroids”
Sending astronauts to the moon is OK — but more Americans think NASA should instead put a high priority on monitoring outer space for asteroids and other objects that could pose a threat to Earth, according to the Pew Research Center’s latest survey focusing on Americans’ perspectives on space policy.
The nonprofit research center’s report was released today, on the 54th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It follows up on a similar survey that was done in 2018 to mark NASA’s 60th anniversary.
The earlier survey suggested that slightly more Americans saw monitoring climate change as a top priority (63% vs 62%). This year, the rankings were reversed, with 60% putting cosmic threats at the top of their list, as opposed to 50% for climate concerns. Only 12% of the respondents said sending astronauts to explore the moon was a top priority, and 11% said sending astronauts to Mars led their list. That translates into less support than those missions had five years ago.
The survey, conducted online from May 30 to June 4, is based on responses from 10,329 randomly selected U.S. adults who are part of the research center’s online panel. The results were weighted to reflect current demographics.
Continue reading “Threats From Above Lead the List of Space Concerns in New Survey”