As the Dawn Spacecraft readies for orbit insertion only a week from now, the images coming in are getting sharper and sharper. Once the craft is fully in orbit its first task will be to map the surface of the planet in high definition. Even on the last few weeks of the journey to Ceres, we have seen increasingly clear images, and have already started asking ‘What the heck is that?’ This week’s ‘what the heck are we looking at?’ involves this apparent double bright spot on Ceres, imaged on February 19th from a distance of 46,000 Km, about an...
If I told you that humanity was going to mine the Moon for rare elements and water ice, you might think it was the plot of a science fiction book I was writing. However, with the recent strides made by unmanned space missions, coupled with a discovery of water and rare elements near the lunar surface, that story could become fact sooner than you’d think. It’s been 40 years since the Apollo landings on the Moon, and for a long time we naively thought we had discovered everything there was to discover about the Moon. We assumed it was a big...
A few years ago, in a desert in Morocco, a very special meteorite was found. A rock unlike anything ever found on Earth, called NWA 7034, or colloquially ‘black beauty.’ Chemical analysis in 2011 found that it originated on Mars, but it was even unlike any other Martian meteorite discovered. The scientific community was extremely excited to determine its properties through a spectroscopic analysis, and today we have some answers that are as amazing as we expected. A new paper detailing spectroscopic results of the meteorite reveal that its composition is the same as the composition of the dark Martian...
Enjoy this great little video about an asteroid hit as viewed by a dinosaur on ancient Earth. The one in the video is 10Km wide and it’s the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous-Paleogene period 66 Million Years ago. For reference, the Asteroid BL86 that passed by us this week was 300Km wide, a true killer! Sadly there’s no explosion, but hey, if we were able to see it we would be instantly vapourized so we wouldn’t be watching it anyway.
In a press conference yesterday, NASA officials revealed the latest data from the Curiosity rover mission on Mars. The data shows that the Rover’s current location, at the base of Mount Sharp in the Gale Crater, was once deep underwater, part of a vast lake filling the entire crater. The results suggest that ancient Mars had a climate that could sustain large lakes across the planet over millions of years. “If our hypothesis for Mount Sharp holds up, it challenges the notion that warm and wet conditions were transient, local, or only underground on Mars,” said Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy...
