News tagged with planetoid

Gentle nudges towards Vesta

The Dawn space probe entered into an orbit around the planetoid Vesta. The planetoid is 2.3 times further from the Sun than the Earth. Dawn used the force of gravity to get there. And an ion engine.

Aug 02, 2011 5 / 5 (3) 1 | with audio podcast

How the Earth survived birth

For the last 20 years, the best models of planet formation—or how planets grow from dust in a gas disk -- have contradicted the very existence of Earth. These models assumed locally constant temperatures within a disk, ...

Jan 07, 2010 4.1 / 5 (7) 1 | with audio podcast