An international team of researchers searched for pieces of a small asteroid tracked in space and then observed to impact Botswana on June 2, 2018. Guided by SETI Institute meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens, they found 23 meteorites deep inside the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and now have published their findings online in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary ...
As the Perseverance rover began to make tracks on the surface of Mars, a sensitive microphone it carries scored a first — the sounds of driving on Mars, including the bangs, pings, and rattles of the robot’s six wheels as they rolled over Martian terrain. Vandi Verma, a senior engineer and rover driver at NASA’s ...
On Feb. 22, 1906, German astrophotographer Max Wolf helped reshape our understanding of the solar system by discovering Trojan asteroids. Again. Born in 1863, Wolf had a habit of dramatically altering the astronomy landscape. Something of a prodigy, he discovered his first comet at only 21 years old. Then, in 1890, he boldly declared that ...
Far below the gaseous atmospheric shroud on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, lies Kraken Mare, a sea of liquid methane. Cornell astronomers have estimated Titan’s largest sea to be at least 1,000 feet deep near its center — enough room for a potential robotic submarine to explore. After sifting through data from one of the final Titan flybys of ...
As Chile and Argentina witnessed the total solar eclipse on Dec. 14, 2020, unbeknownst to skywatchers, a tiny speck was flying past the Sun — a recently discovered comet. It was first spotted in satellite data by Thai amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod on the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project — a citizen science project that invites anyone to search for and ...
An exoplanet in an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away may offer a clue to a mystery much closer to home: a hypothesized, distant body in our solar system dubbed “Planet Nine.” This is the first time that astronomers have been able to measure the motion of a massive Jupiter-like planet that ...
An orbiting instrument hints at how stored magnetic energy heats the solar atmosphere. A phenomenon first detected in the solar wind may help solve a long-standing mystery about the Sun: why the solar atmosphere is millions of degrees hotter than the surface. Images from the Earth-orbiting Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, aka IRIS, and the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, ...
On Dec. 6 local time (Dec. 5 in the United States), Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 dropped a capsule to the ground in the Australian Outback from about 120 miles (or 200 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Inside that capsule is some of the most precious cargo in the solar system: dust that the spacecraft collected earlier this year ...
Mars once had oceans but is now bone-dry, leaving many to wonder how the water was lost. University of Arizona researchers have discovered a surprisingly large amount of water in the upper atmosphere of Mars, where it is rapidly destroyed, explaining part of this Martian mystery. Shane Stone, a graduate student in the University of ...
On Oct. 29, mission operators sent a series of commands to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft for the first time since mid-March. The spacecraft has been flying solo while the 70-meter-wide (230-foot-wide) radio antenna used to talk to it has been offline for repairs and upgrades. Voyager 2 returned a signal confirming it had received the “call” and ...
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