Astro Blog

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/nov/16/meteorite-that-landed-in-cotswolds-may-solve-mystery-of-earths-water By  Hannah Devlin , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Water covers three-quarters of the Earth’s surface and was crucial for the emergence of life, but its origins have remained a subject of active debate among scientists. Now, a 4.6bn-year-old rock that crashed on to a  driveway in Gloucestershire last year  has provided some of the most compelling evidence to date that water arrived on Earth from asteroids in the outer solar system.... 

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/liftoff-nasa-s-artemis-i-mega-rocket-launches-orion-to-moon NASA  RELEASE 22-117 .  Excerpt: Following a successful launch of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket in the world, the agency’s Orion spacecraft is on its way to the Moon as part of the Artemis program. Carrying an uncrewed Orion, SLS lifted off for its flight test debut at 1:47 a.m. EST Wednesday from Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch is the first leg of a mission in which Orion is planned to travel approximately 40,000 miles beyond the Moon and return to Earth over the course of 25.5 days. Known as  Artemis I , the mission is a critical part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, in which the agency explores for the benefit of humanity. It’s an important test for the agency before flying astronauts on the  Artemis II  mission.... 

https://eos.org/articles/a-day-in-the-life-used-to-be-17-hours By Emily Shepherd , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: The Moon was a lot closer to Earth 2.46 billion years ago, and the shorter distance contributed to shorter days. ...new research has calculated the distance of the Moon 2.46 billion years ago, nearly doubling the age of the previous estimate. Because the length of the day is tightly, tidally tied to the location of the Moon, the research has also calculated how long a day lasted at the time: 17 hours. ...To determine the distance of the Moon, scientists studied rhythmic patterns in Earth’s orbit and axis called  Milankovitch cycles , explained  Margriet Lantink , a geologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and lead author of the  new study in the  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America ....

https://gss.lawrencehallofscience.org/ac7-planet-star-systems/ Near the top of this page you can find links to some nifty activities from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, Night Sky Network.… 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/movies/good-night-oppy-review.html By  Ben Kenigsberg , The New York Times Excerpt: NASA’s  Opportunity Rover  landed on Mars in January 2004 and chugged along for more than 14 years before giving out. (In February 2019, NASA  declared the mission over .) Opportunity’s anticipated time in service — a span that Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission, is heard likening in  “Good Night Oppy ” to a warranty — was only around 90 days. Oppy, and to a lesser extent its sister rover, Spirit, which “died” several years earlier, was the robot geologist that refused to quit.  Neither rover, alas, shot cinematic-quality footage of the red planet, but in this documentary from Ryan White ( “Assassins,”   on the killing of Kim Jong-nam), visual effects work from Industrial Light & Magic allows viewers to imagine they’re exploring craters and bedrock right alongside the androids. ... the way “Good Night Oppy” a...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/science/asteroid-planet-killer.html By Robin George Andrews , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Last year, in the hope of finding asteroids cloaked by excessive sunlight, an international team of astronomers co-opted a camera primarily designed to investigate the universe’s notoriously elusive dark energy. In  an announcement Monday  based on a survey first published in September in  The Astronomical Journal , the researchers announced the discovery of three new light-drowned projectiles. One of them, 2022 AP7, is roughly a mile long, and its orbit crosses Earth’s path around the sun, getting as near as 4.4 million miles to Earth itself — uncomfortably close by cosmic standards (although far more distant than Earth’s moon). That makes 2022 AP7 “the largest potentially hazardous asteroid found in the last eight years or so,” said  Scott Sheppard , an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., and an auth...