An international study led by researchers from the
Institute of Space Sciences, from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)
and the Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya has discovered that
carbonaceous chondrites, a class of meteorites, incorporated hydrated minerals
along with organic material from the protoplanetary disk before the formation
of planets.

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A new study published online in Meteoritics and
Planetary Science finds that our most common meteorites, those known as L
chondrites, come from at least two different debris fields in the asteroid
belt.

The belt contains many debris fields created from
former dwarf planets, or dwarf planets in the making,

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Scientists have
discovered a possible second impact crater buried under more than a mile of ice
in northwest Greenland.

This follows the
finding, announced in November 2018, of a 19-mile-wide crater beneath Hiawatha
Glacier – the first meteorite impact crater ever discovered under Earth’s ice
sheets. Though the newly found impact sites in northwest Greenland are only 114
miles apart,

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Astronomers have discovered an asteroid looping
through the inner solar system on an exotic orbit. The unusual object is among
the first asteroids ever found whose orbit is confined almost entirely within
the orbit of Venus. The asteroid’s existence hints at potentially significant
numbers of space rocks arcing unseen in uncharted regions nearer to the sun.

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A US-German research team has simulated
meteorite impacts in the lab and followed the resulting structural changes in
two feldspar minerals with X-rays as they happened. The results of the
experiments at DESY and at Argonne National Laboratory in the US show that
structural changes can occur at very different pressures,

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ESA’s planet-defending Hera mission
will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the
first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but
the smaller of these two worldlets, comparable in size to Egypt’s Great Pyramid
of Giza, will become the smallest asteroid ever visited.

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By looking at
the Moon, the most complete and accessible chronicle of the asteroid collisions
that carved our young solar system, a group of scientists is challenging our
understanding of a part of Earth’s history.

The number of
asteroid impacts to the Moon and Earth increased by two to three times starting
around 290 million years ago,

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The celestial
body known as AG3 was first mapped in December. Scientists then prepared to
keep track of it, as it was projected to pass in the Earth’s vicinity two weeks
into the new year.

A huge asteroid
tracked by radars only a month ago passed just a short distance away from our
planet in the early hours of Monday,

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Australians find extremely rare mineral in
meteorite impact crater

A group of scientists has discovered one of the rarest
minerals on Earth buried deep within what may be the largest-known meteorite
impact crater in Australia.

The ultra-rare mineral known as reidite was found by
Curtin University researchers in the long buried Woodleigh Crater near Shark
Bay,

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On Dec. 3, after traveling billions of kilometers from
Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached its target, Bennu, and kicked off a
nearly two-year, up-close investigation of the asteroid. It will inspect nearly
every square inch of this ancient clump of rubble left over from the formation
of our solar system.

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