Tag Archives: asteroid

Mining Near-Earth Asteroids: The trillion dollar enticement

Asteroid Ida…….credit: NASA/JPL The race to put a man on the Moon between the United States and the Soviet Union is long over. NASA got there first, national glory was achieved and then NASA and the American public lost interest in the Moon. The Russians’ all out space effort collapsed with the Soviet Union and [...]
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Asteroid 2005 YU55: No impact on the neighborhood

Asteroid 2005 YU55 photographed in passing…Credit: NASA November 9, 2011: It was a reminder for the neighborhood (Earth and Moon) that strangers pass in the night. Night being metaphorical in this case because the asteroid 2005 YU55 actually took about three days to orbit through the vicinity of the Earth and Moon. As asteroids go, [...]
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Almahata Sitta: A meteorite suggests a new way to form amino acids

Asteroid collision, NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture….credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt Finding amino acids, the building blocks of life, in meteorites is not new. Finding them in a meteorite that is a fragment of an asteroid collision, a piece formed at more than two thousand degrees Fahrenheit (1100 degrees Celsius) – now that makes astrobiologists [...]
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Two Notable Space Successes

Concerning space missions, there’s always something happening in space. Most of it is ‘routine’ in the sense that what happens was expected and a normal part of the mission. Re-supply of the International Space Station generally falls into that category (except a couple of weeks ago when the resupply vehicle missed the station on the [...]
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Science panel: Chicxulub did it

Sometimes ‘the facts’ discovered by science answer questions by themselves, but much of the time facts are used for competing hypotheses. Sometimes more facts settle the issue of which hypothesis better fits the facts, but like as not, the ‘better fit’ is a matter of interpretation. If the issue at hand is important enough, scientists [...]
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New Report: Get real about asteroids hitting Earth

It has been said, and said more often these days, that humanity is good at dealing with trouble in the here-and-now; and terrible at dealing with disaster in the future. Consider the response to the Haiti earthquake on one hand, and the just released report from the National Research Council (USA), Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth [...]
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Russians plan asteroid diversion

Nazdrovia! Nothing like starting off 2010 with a little talk of Armageddon (the movie). Rumors were flying around the Internet just before the New Year that the Russians are planning a mission to divert the asteroid 99942 Apophis away from Earth collision.
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