This image of the asteroid Eros—named after the Greek god of love—was captured on March 3, 2000, by NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft. It’s actually a mosaic of six separate images acquired from a distance of 127 miles from the 20-mile-wide asteroid, and reveals many large boulders scattered across the surface down to about 160 feet in…
Category: Comets and Asteroids
OSIRIS-REx Captures a Picture of Jupiter from L4
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx may be designed to study asteroids close up but recently it’s captured a view of something farther away and much, much larger: the giant planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons at a distance of over 400 million miles! The image was taken on Feb. 12, 2017, when the spacecraft was 76 million…
Chelyabinsk: a Blast From the Not-Too-Distant Past (or, How’s That Space Program Coming Along?)
Four years ago today an explosion shattered the morning sky over the Chelyabinsk region in southwestern Russia, the result of a 60-foot-wide fragment of an asteroid entering Earth’s atmosphere at over 40,000 mph and brilliantly blowing itself to smithereens at 97,000 feet up. Even at that altitude, the resulting flash of light and air blast was powerful…
Could This Asteroid Hit Earth? Astronomers Go “Back in Time” to Find the Answer
Astronomers are always watching the skies for observations of near-Earth asteroids—”space rocks” that have orbits close to Earth’s and, in the case of potentially hazardous asteroids (aka PHAs), those whose orbits could actually cross Earth’s and are larger than 150 meters (500 ft) across. When a new one of these is discovered—no small feat considering that…
Asteroid 16 Psyche Could Truly Be a Psychedelic Little World—AND Worth Quadrillions
NASA recently announced the go-ahead for a new Discovery-level mission that would send a spacecraft to explore 16 Psyche, a 130-mile-wide asteroid in the Solar System’s main belt between Mars and Jupiter. 16 Psyche is a relatively small world but is made almost entirely of metals—some of them what we’d consider precious on Earth, like nickel, gold, and…
NASA Announces Two New Exploration Missions
Happy New Year! Just four days into 2017 NASA announced its pick for two new Discovery missions to explore our solar system: one to investigate a few of the “Trojan” asteroids that Jupiter has gathered into its orbit with its mighty gravity, and another to visit the remains of an ancient planet’s metallic core! “These are true…
With One More Comet Landing Rosetta’s “Rock and Roll” Mission is Ended
Rosetta is down. I repeat: Rosetta is down. This morning, Sept. 30, 2016, just after 10:39 UTC (6:39 a.m. EDT) ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft ended its mission with an impact onto the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The descent, begun with a final burn of its thrusters about 14 hours earlier, was slow, stately, and deliberate, but even…
NASA Readies OSIRIS-REx to Visit an Asteroid
NASA is about to embark on its first mission to sample an asteroid—and I’ll have a front-row seat to the launch! On Thursday, Sept. 8, at 7:05 p.m. (23:05 UTC) the launch window opens for the launch of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s mission to visit the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, orbit and map it, collect a sample and…
Rosetta Finally Found Its Lost Philae Lander
Nearly two years after its historic landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, ESA’s lander has finally been spotted in an image from the orbiting Rosetta spacecraft—PHILAE HAS BEEN FOUND!
We Still Don’t Know What Exploded Over Tunguska in 1908
This is an article, now updated, that I originally posted in 2009 during my first year of blogging. Since then more research has been done on the famous 1908 Tunguska Event and we even had a remarkably similar type of thing occur in February 2013 over the Chelyabinsk area, not too far from Tunguska, but…
Goodnight, Sweet Philae: ESA’s Comet Lander Likely in Permanent Hibernation
ESA’s Philae lander, the first spacecraft to successfully soft-land on the surface of a comet and former piggyback partner to Rosetta, has not been in communication since July of 2015. With 67P now six months past perihelion and heading deeper out into the Solar System and Rosetta’s mission coming to a close this year, it’s…
Surprise: Ceres’ Bright Spots are Probably Salt
So now that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been in orbit around Ceres for seven months, has the nature of its strange bright spots finally been determined? Are they brilliantly reflective deposits of water ice, as many initially suspected? Or just some curiously-bright rock faces? (Or the metallic remains of an ancient alien space base, like more…
Lights in the Dark 