Curtin University planetary scientists have
announced the discovery of two new large cosmic ‘hole-in-one’ meteorite impact
structures, located in Western Australia and Central America.

The research was published in two separate papers
in leading journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science.

Lead author honours student Morgan Cox, from
Curtin’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences,

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A popular theme in the movies is that of an
incoming asteroid that could extinguish life on the planet, and our heroes are
launched into space to blow it up. But incoming asteroids may be harder to
break than scientists previously thought, finds a Johns Hopkins study that used
a new understanding of rock fracture and a new computer modeling method to
simulate asteroid collisions.

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Every school child knows the dinosaurs were killed off by an asteroid smashing into the Earth some 66 million years ago.

But scientists
say the story may not be quite that simple, and that massive volcanic eruptions
over hundreds of thousands of years may have contributed to the dinosaurs’

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A Japanese probe sent to collect samples from an
asteroid 300 million kilometres away for clues about the origin of life and the
solar system landed successfully on Friday, scientists said.

Hayabusa2 touched down briefly on the Ryugu
asteroid, fired a bullet into the surface to puff up dust for collection and
blasted back to its holding position,

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ESA’s proposed Hera mission will already visit two
asteroids: the Didymos binary pair. The Hera team hopes to boost that number by
performing a flyby of another asteroid during the mission’s three-year flight.

The opportunity arises because Hera will be flying
out to match Didymos’ 770-day orbit, which circles from less than 10 million km
from Earth to out beyond Mars,

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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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