Meteorites

A New Look at Apollo Samples Supports Ancient Impact Theory

May 24, 2012

New investigations of lunar samples collected during the Apollo missions have revealed origins from beyond the Earth-Moon system, supporting a hypothesis of ancient cataclysmic bombardment for both worlds.

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Fragments of Meteorite Worth Their Weight in Gold

May 1, 2012

Actually it’s more like 3.5 times their weight in gold, according to today’s market value… and meteorite experts from SETI and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

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Meteorite Hunters Find Fragments from the Recent ‘Daytime Fireball’ in California

April 26, 2012

Meteorite hunters have been successful in locating fragments from the huge meteor visible in the daytime skies over California last weekend. One of the successful hunters was Peter Jenniskens, an expert in meteors and meteorites, perhaps best known for retrieving the fragments of asteroid 2008 TC3 which fell in Sudan in 2008. Astronomer Franck Marchis [...]

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Fireball Over California Exploded with Force of 5 Kilotons

April 24, 2012

A daytime fireball over the skies of central/northern California on Sunday morning, April 22, 2012 caused a loud explosion and the event was also detected on several seismographs stations in the area. According to Bill Cooke, head of NASA’s Meteoroid Environments Office, the source of the blast was a meteoroid about the size of a [...]

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Shaking Up Theories Of Earth’s Formation

March 30, 2012

Researchers from The Australian National University are suggesting that Earth didn’t form as previously thought, shaking up some long-standing hypotheses of our planet’s origins right down to the core — literally.

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Valuable Space Rock Crashes Into Oslo Cabin

March 12, 2012

A family in Oslo got a surprise when they visited their allotment garden cabin for the first time this season and found that a 585-gram (20 oz.) meteorite had ripped a hole through the roof. The space rock was discovered “lying five or six metres away,” the cabin’s owner, Rune Thomassen, told the local newspaper [...]

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NEOShield: a Preemptive Strike Against Asteroids

February 15, 2012

Scientists aren’t entirely sure when the last major asteroid hit the Earth, but it’s certain to happen again. Alan Harris, asteroid researcher at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR), is hoping to head the next one off. Last month, Harris established an international collaboration of 13 researchers to investigate methods [...]

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Asteroid Vesta Floats in Space in High Resolution 3-D

February 6, 2012

The giant Asteroid Vesta literally floats in space in a new high resolution 3-D image of the battered bodies Eastern Hemisphere taken by NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Orbiter. Haul out your red-cyan 3-D anaglyph glasses and lets go whirling around Vesta and sledding down mountains to greet the alien Snowman! The sights are fabulous ! The [...]

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Mystery Moon Flashes Caused by Meteorite Impacts

January 27, 2012

For hundreds of years, people have seen tiny flashes of light on the surface of the Moon. Very brief, but bright enough to be seen from Earth, these odd flashes still hadn’t been adequately explained up until now. Also known as Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLPs), they’ve been observed on many occasions, but rarely photographed. On [...]

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Rocks From Mars

January 20, 2012

Scientists studying life on Mars got a late Christmas present this year: confirmation that meteorites found in Morocco in December are of Martian origin. It’s a significant discovery; Martian meteorites fall to Earth only about once every 50 years making this a once-in-a-lifetime, and for many a once-in-a-career, event. The Mars rocks are worth more [...]

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‘Impossible’ Crystals May Have Come From Space

January 4, 2012

A unique type of crystal appears to have its origins in meteorites, according to a new study. Quasicrystals are an unusual type of crystalline structure that were initially thought to have only occurred in artificial conditions in labs, and impossible in nature, until they were found by geologists in the Koryak mountains in Russia in [...]

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Holiday Greetings from an Alien Snowman on Vesta

December 22, 2011

Celebrate the winter holiday season in the company of an ‘Alien Snowman’ on the asteroid Vesta, someone we didn’t even have a clue about until six months ago. Vesta and the Snowman have been transformed into the beautiful banner above – sent to me courtesy of the Dawn mission team to share with the readers [...]

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Incoming! Meteorite Shockwaves Could Set Off Martian Dust Avalanches

December 19, 2011

They are headed toward the surface like a speeding freight train… and running ahead of them is a shockwave. Just like a loud sound can trigger a snow avalanche here on Earth, the shockwave of a meteorite crashing through the Martian atmosphere could trigger dust avalanches on the surface before an actual impact.

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Meteorite Alert! Remote Cameras Capture Slow-Moving Fireball near Toronto

December 14, 2011

In newly released footage from the University of Western Ontario, a bright, slow-moving fireball was captured in the skies near Toronto, Canada on December 12, 2011 by remote cameras watching for meteors. Although this meteor looks huge as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere, astronomers estimate the rock to have been no bigger than a [...]

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Rainbow of Colors Reveal Asteroid Vesta as More Like a Planet

December 7, 2011

The giant Asteroid Vesta is among the most colorful bodies in our entire solar system and it appears to be much more like a terrestrial planet than a mere asteroid, say scientists deciphering stunning new images and measurements of Vesta received from NASA’s revolutionary Dawn spacecraft. The space probe only recently began circling about the [...]

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Asteroid Lutetia… A Piece Of Earth?

November 12, 2011

According to data received from ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, ESO’s New Technology Telescope, and NASA telescopes, strange asteroid Lutetia could be a real piece of the rock… the original material that formed the Earth, Venus and Mercury! By examining precious meteors which may have formed at the time of the inner Solar System, scientists have found [...]

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Rare Pallasite Meteorite Found in Missouri

November 10, 2011

Meteorite hunter Karl Aston finds meteorites not by digging in the ground, but by placing ads in local newspapers. He asked people who found unusual rocks to contact him. Most responses were bum leads, but in 2009 Aston heard from a farmer in the northwestern Missouri of Conception Junction, who found something interesting: An unusually [...]

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Did A Supernova Shape Our Solar System?

November 4, 2011

Away in space some 4.57 billion years ago, in a galaxy yet to be called the Milky Way, a hydrogen molecular cloud collapsed. From it was born a G-type main sequence star and around it swirled a solar nebula which eventually gelled into a solar system. But just what caused the collapse of the molecular [...]

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The Asteroid That Fell To Earth: Meteorites from 2008 TC3 Still Giving Up Their Secrets

October 31, 2011

It was an unprecedented event: On October 6, 2008, asteroid 2008 TC3 was spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey Telescope in Arizona. Plotting its trajectory, astronomers knew the 80-ton rock was heading for a collision course with Earth. Just 19 hours later, 2008 TC3 streaked over skies of northern Sudan and then exploded about 37 [...]

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Meteorite Impact Sites Treated To CSI Techniques

October 19, 2011

Over the last several years, we’ve been treated to television programs which have awakened us to how a crime scene is investigated. It’s a very precise science and one that could very well deepen our understanding of other types of occurrences. Now, new research done by Mike Branney, of the University of Leicester’s Department of [...]

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