A NASA mission to deliberately smash a spacecraft into an asteroid—a test run should humanity ever need to stop a giant space rock from wiping out life on Earth—blasted off Tuesday from California.
Space Exploration
Nov 23, 2021
0
4309
A near-Earth asteroid named Kamo`oalewa could be a fragment of our moon, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona.
Planetary Sciences
Nov 11, 2021
2
310
The dwarf planet Vesta is helping scientists better understand the earliest era in the formation of our solar system. Two recent papers involving scientists from the University of California, Davis, use data from meteorites ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 6, 2021
1
158
In the early solar system, terrestrial planets like Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are thought to have formed from planetesimals, small early planets. These early planets grew over time, through collisions and mergers, to ...
Astronomy
Sep 1, 2021
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531
The asteroid Vesta is the second largest asteroid in our Solar System. With a diameter of about 330 miles, it orbits the sun between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
Astronomy
Aug 31, 2021
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4667
The widely studied metallic asteroid known as 16 Psyche was long thought to be the exposed iron core of a small planet that failed to form during the earliest days of the solar system. But new University of Arizona-led research ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 9, 2021
23
5351
Tropical rainforests today are biodiversity hotspots and play an important role in the world's climate systems. A new study published today in Science sheds light on the origins of modern rainforests and may help scientists ...
Earth Sciences
Apr 1, 2021
0
1573
Last month, Japan's Hayabusa2 mission brought home a cache of rocks collected from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. While analysis of those returned samples is just getting underway, researchers are using data from the ...
Astronomy
Jan 5, 2021
0
413
A Southwest Research Institute-led team of scientists has identified a potentially new meteorite parent asteroid by studying a small shard of a meteorite that arrived on Earth a dozen years ago. The composition of a piece ...
Astronomy
Dec 21, 2020
4
315
Most meteorites that have landed on Earth are fragments of planetesimals, the very earliest protoplanetary bodies in the solar system. Scientists have thought that these primordial bodies either completely melted early in ...
Space Exploration
Jul 24, 2020
10
273
