Jay TateA Southwest Research Institute scientist is helping NASA observe and characterize near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a threat to Earth or have potential for further exploration. SwRI’s Dr. Tracy Becker is part of an international team of scientists who will use the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to study nearby asteroids and comets through a $19 million grant managed by the University of Central Florida (UCF).
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Jay TateGregory Laughlin and Malena Rice weren’t exactly surprised a few weeks ago when they learned that a second interstellar object had made its way into our solar system.
The Yale University astronomers had just put the finishing touches on a new study suggesting that these strange, icy visitors from other planets are going to keep right on coming.
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Jay TateEarth will soon lose a key tool in the fight to spot potentially hazardous asteroids — and NASA has decided to fund a custom-built replacement.
NASA wants to build a space telescope to survey the sky in infrared light, a much-needed boost in its program to identify and track asteroids in Earth’s immediate neighborhood.
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Jay TateThe Karla crater, one of the about 150 large impact structures on Earth, is situated near the border of the Republic of Tatarstan and Chuvash Republic, about 163 kilometers from Kazan Federal University.
Previous research there took place in the 1980s. This time, Russian and French scientists conducted new inquiries.
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Jay TateA new study led by a University of Central Florida researcher may fundamentally alter our understanding of how comets arrive from the outskirts of the solar system and are funnelled to the inner solar system coming closer to Earth.
In a study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters this week,
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Jay TateAn international study led by researchers from Lund University in Sweden has found that a collision in the asteroid belt 470 million years ago created drastic changes to life on Earth. The breakup of a major asteroid filled the entire inner solar system with enormous amounts of dust leading to a unique ice age and,
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Jay TateThe celestial object flew past the Earth five times closer than the Moon and highlights the need to improve NASA’s detection systems.
Internal emails reveal that NASA discussed 2019 OK “because there may be media coverage” and only 30 minutes before it whizzed past the Earth. The size of a football pitch,
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Jay TateAbout 466 million years ago, there was an asteroid collision in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The collision caused the breakup of a major asteroid, creating a shower of dust throughout the inner Solar System. That event is called the Ordovician Meteor Event, and its dust caused an ice age here on Earth.
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Jay TateSurprising results from recent asteroid missions have highlighted the importance of testing planetary defence strategies in space, according to scientists participating in the joint ESA/NASA Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) collaboration. The unexpectedly large crater on asteroid Ryugu created by the JAXA Hayabysa2 impactor, together with the sand-like behaviour of material on its surface,
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Jay TateAnalysis of a bright flash in Jupiter’s atmosphere observed by an amateur astronomer in August 2019 has revealed that the likely cause was a small asteroid with a density typical of stony-iron meteors. The impact is estimated to have released energy equivalent to an explosion of 240 kilotons of TNT – around half the energy released in the 2013 Chelyabinsk event at Earth.
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