Astro Blog

https://eos.org/articles/an-asteroid-double-disaster-struck-germany-in-the-miocene Source:  By  Katherine Kornei , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: A Gothic church rises high above the medieval town of Nördlingen, Germany. But unlike most churches, St. George’s is composed of a very special type of rock:  suevite , a coarse-grained breccia that’s formed only in powerful impacts. That discovery and  other lines of evidence  have helped researchers determine that Nördlingen lies within an impact crater. Now, scientists have unearthed evidence that this crater and another one just 40 kilometers away were formed by a “double disaster” of two independent asteroid impacts. ...Our planet is dotted with  nearly 200 confirmed impact structures , and a handful of them appear in close pairs. Some researchers have proposed that these apparent double craters are scars created by  binary asteroids  slamming into Earth at the same time. ...However, scientists have theo...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/china-lands-its-moon-rocks-inner-mongolia Source:  By   Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: China’s Chang’e-5 mission made a triumphant return around 1 p.m. EST today, landing in the middle of the night on the dark frozen plains of Inner Mongolia, Chinese   state media reported . The capsule’s return marks the first time China has collected rocks from the Moon—and the first time any nation has accomplished the feat since 1976. The 3-week-long mission   was the most complicated   in the history of China’s robotic space exploration program, involving a lunar landing, furious scooping and drilling of up to 2 kilograms of grit, and then an ascent and rendezvous with an orbiter, which carried the samples back to Earth. The China National Space Administration, typically secretive with its missions, showed growing confidence in its space program, with live broadcasts of the rocket launch and return of its sample caps...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/japan-s-hayabusa2-capsule-lands-carbon-rich-asteroid-samples Source:    By  Dennis Normile , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: Japan has once again retrieved samples from a distant asteroid, which scientists will scrutinize for clues about the ancient delivery of water and organic molecules to Earth. The return capsule of the Hayabusa2 mission—about the size and shape of a wok—parachuted to a landing in the red desert sand of Woomera, Australia, in the early morning of 6 December, after a nearly 5.3-billion-kilometer trip to the asteroid Ryugu. A helicopter team homed in on a radio beacon and found the capsule intact. Launched in 2014 by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Hayabusa2 spent 18 months circling Ryugu, making remote observations of  the diamond-shaped rubble pile . It also released several tiny rovers that hopped on the surface gathering data. After ide...

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/moon-may-hold-billions-of-tons-of-subterranean-ice-at-its-poles Source:  By Jerald Pinson, Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: New research indicates that if even a moderate amount of the water delivered by asteroids to the Moon was sequestered, the lunar poles would contain gigaton deposits (1 billion metric tons) of ice in sheltered craters and beneath its surface. ...“We looked at the entire time history of ice deposition on the Moon,” said   Kevin Cannon , a planetary scientist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden and lead author of the   new study   in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters. Cannon and his team used conservative estimates for the amount of water that asteroids were likely to contain upon impact with the Moon and how much of it was likely to be retained once the dust had settled. ...“If the very oldest regions have been stable and accumulating ice for billions of years, then some could have very substantial de...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/famed-meteorite-reveals-early-water-mars-and-early-outer-space-bombardment Source:  By   Paul Voosen .  Excerpt: With just 15 grams of the 4.4-billion-year-old   “Black Beauty” meteorite   [from Mars] discovered in 2011 in the western Sahara, [Martin Bizzarro’s] team has revealed a record of asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions spanning nearly all of martian history. One of the most surprising findings: After Mars underwent a pummeling early in its life, all went quiet—even during a time, nearly 4 billion years ago, when our Solar System was thought to have suffered a cataclysmic assault... .  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/15/spacex-launch-live-updates-crew1/ Source:   By  Christian Davenport  and  Hamza Shaban , The Washington Post.  Excerpt: CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company’s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight. SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after  it completed a test flight  of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.... 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/martian-dust-storms-parch-planet-driving-water-space Source:  By   Paul Voosen , Science Magazine.  Excerpt: ...Martian dust storms are common, but every decade or so, for reasons unknown, a monstrous one goes global, veiling the planet. The storms can be a mortal threat to exploration: The one in 2018   killed off NASA’s Opportunity rover   by coating its solar panels in dust. But now, researchers say the storms may also be one of the culprits in the ultimate martian cold case: how the once-wet planet lost its water. Fossilized rivers and deltas etched across Mars   suggest water flowed there billions of years ago . Most of it must have somehow escaped to space—yet researchers thought water vapor could not travel high in the frigid, thin atmosphere without condensing into snow and falling back to the surface. New data from NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter,   published today   ...