Sign up for free Newsletters

Once a month get new photos and expert tips.

Sign Up

Search Results

Results tagged “impacts” from Breaking Orbit

NASA Crashes the Moon Tomorrow Morning

Posted on October 8, 2009 | 1 Comments

Tags:

By James Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media

One of the coolest-sounding missions launched by NASA comes to an explosive end tomorrow morning.  The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (or LCROSS) will smash into the moon at about 4:30 a.m. PST (7:30 a.m. EST), followed by another impact four minutes later. (Read the National Geographic News preview NASA Moon "Bombings" Tomorrow: Sky Show, Water Expected.)

The first stage of the LCROSS is designed to kick up a huge plume of dust in the permanently dark Cabeus crater at the south pole of the moon. The second stage contains scientific equipment to collect the dust and determine if it contains water ice, before crashing into the moon itself and causing a purely gratuitous explosion. 

According to the mission's NASA page, amateur astronomers with a 10 to 12-inch telescope should be able to see the dust plumes created by the impacts.

If you don't have a telescope, you can watch the camera footage from the satellite and mission control at the Newseum in Washington, DC, at a special watch party on their 40-foot high video wall, at other locations around the world, or on the Internet at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html.

You will also be able to watch video and read about the mission afterward on National Geographic News.

If water ice is found in the dust, it would confirm findings of water and hydroxyl molecules by NASA instruments aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft launched about a year ago.

Disclosure: James Robertson is a consultant for the Newseum.


Along Came a Spider

Posted on September 23, 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags:

As anyone who's recently cleaned their attic can tell you, unexpectedly finding a large spider sitting in a dark, hidden part of your home can elicit excitement, consternation, and sometimes a family squabble.

Apparently it's no different if you are a planetary scientist, even when the home in question is the solar system and the "spider" is a mysterious formation sitting in a crater on Mercury.

In January the MESSENGER spacecraft beamed back images of a side of Mercury no one on Earth had seen before.

The suite of new data from the probe's first flyby of the innermost planet revealed lots of volcanism, asteroid impacts, and an odd feature the team dubbed the spider—a network of more than a hundred raised, narrow troughs radiating outward from a central structure.

mercury-spider.jpg

—courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

The whole formation sits in the middle of the Caloris Basin, a massive 3.8-billion-year-old impact crater that had not been seen in its entirety before the flyby.

Today Sean Solomon, principle investigator for the MESSENGER mission, presented at the 3rd European Planetary Science Congress his theory that the spider is the product of a meteorite impact.

► Read This Entire Post

Ich Liebe Planeten

Posted on September 22, 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags:

Germany takes on the worlds this week, as the 3rd European Planetary Science Congress gets underway in Münster.

Today's cornucopia included a presentation from Gerhard Schmidt of the University of Mainz, who says that platinum rings come from outer space.

More precisely, the idea is that platinum, gold, and other precious "iron-loving" metals were stripped from the planet's superheated self as Earth formed, but then were delivered back to the exterior layers by asteroid impacts once things cooled down a bit.

asteroid-jewel.jpg

The stony asteroid Kleopatra
—courtesy NASA

Schmidt was prompted to investigate the matter because the ratios of iron-loving metals in Earth's mantle are not quite in line with their abundances in meteorites known as chondrites—stony chunks of space rock thought to represent pristine material from the birth of the solar system.

His team calculates that 160 asteroids each about 12 miles (20 kilometers) across smashed into Earth roughly 20 to 30 million years after the core formed, depositing the metals in question onto our young planet.

The glitch with this theory is that even after 12 years of studying impact craters on Earth, along with bits of earthly, lunar, and Martian rock from impact sites, Schmidt and co. can't exactly match any known meteorites to the metal ratios found in Earth's mantle.

What's more, asteroids that might have the necessary ratios are predicted to come from the space between Mercury and Venus, but no known meteorites from this region have ever been found.

Still, it's an intriguing hypothesis, especially for someone like me who is always looking for the next geeky but decorative conversation piece.

About This Blog

The moon
From dwarf planets to hot Jupiters, join NatGeo News space and tech editor Victoria Jaggard in a global discussion about all things extraterrestrial.


news.nationalgeographic.com

Share This

Add to Technorati Favorites
 

Subscribe to This Blog

Get the RSS feed for this blog—and don't miss a single word.

RSS     What is RSS?

Blogroll