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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Jay TateAn amateur astronomer has discovered a comet that could come from outside our Solar System.
If so, it would be the second interstellar object after the elongated body known as ‘Oumuamua was identified in 2017.
The Minor Planet Center (MPC) at Harvard University has issued a formal announcement of the discovery.
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Jay TateThe next few days will see a rare convergence of asteroid-related activity in Europe, as planetary defence and other experts meet in three locations to coordinate humanity’s efforts to defend ourselves from hazardous space rocks.
Such intense levels of international scientific collaboration are driven in part by the fact that an asteroid impact could cause devastating effects on Earth.
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Jay TateBy Jonathan Amos, BBC Science Correspondent
Scientists have a recording of the worst day on Earth; certainly the worst day in the last 66 million years.
It takes the form of a 130m section of rock drilled from under the Gulf of Mexico.
These are sediments that were laid down in the seconds to hours after a huge asteroid had slammed into the planet.
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Jay TateA land and air search was launched in Devon after a suspected meteor was feared to be an aircraft breaking up in the sky.
Numerous callers alerted police to the flying object during the early hours of Sunday. It was later seen breaking apart and falling towards the ground.
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Jay TateKnowledge is power, and NASA has just invested $19
million into the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to gain a lot of knowledge
about asteroids.
NASA awarded the University of Central Florida
(which manages the site on behalf of National Science Foundation) the four-year
grant to observe and characterize near-Earth objects (NEO) that pose a
potential hazard to Earth or that could be candidates for future space
missions.
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