Meteorite impacts may be a good thing — but only sometimes.
Craters could create habitable conditions on many planets and moons.
Category: asteroid/comet impacts – Page 23
A meteoroid skimmed Earth’s atmosphere for 19 seconds over the Netherlands and Germany. The object came in as low as 56 miles in altitude, covering a path of more than 466 miles.
US space agency NASA has forecast a recently-spotted asteroid, 2020 SW, for a fly-by on Thursday. It will fly by at an agonising distance of around 17,000 miles – closer than a weather satellite.
Darmstadt, 15 September 2020. – The European Space Agency (ESA) awarded a €129.4 million contract covering the design, manufacturing and testing of Hera, the space agency’s first mission for planetary defence, ESA announced today.
The contract was signed by Franco Ongaro, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, and Marco Fuchs, CEO of Germany space company OHB, prime contractor of the Hera consortium, ESA said today. The signing took place at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, which will serve as mission control for the 2024-launched Hera.
The mission will be Europe’s contribution to an international asteroid deflection effort, set to perform sustained exploration of a double asteroid system, ESA said.
Hera will be, along with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids, the agency said.
Hera is the European contribution to an international planetary defence collaboration among European and US scientists called the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA).
ASTEROID trackers at US-based space agency NASA have revealed a trio of cosmic rocks will safely skim past Earth today.
A HUGE meteor streaked in the skies above California, leaving onlookers stunned with one claiming it was “a close call”.
It is reported that the dimensions of the celestial body are from 22 to 49 meters. According to the space agency, at the minimum distance to the planet – about 120 thousand kilometers – the asteroid will come up at 19.12 Moscow time. The asteroid is moving at 8.16 kilometers per second.
Note that the celestial body was discovered on March 2, 2011. It belongs to the group of “Apollo”, that is, asteroids, whose flight paths cross the Earth’s orbit.
Amid a pandemic, civil unrest and a divisive US election season, we now have an asteroid zooming toward us.
On the day before the presidential vote, no less.
Yep. The celestial object known as 2018VP1 is projected to come close to Earth on November 2, according to the Center for Near Earth Objects Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
As if 2020 hadn’t already thrown enough at us, NASA says an asteroid will come close to Earth on November 2.
As if there wasn’t enough to think about these days, now there is talk of an asteroid, which is supposedly heading directly for Earth.