Perhaps the most famous thing about the dinosaurs is the giant space rock that seemingly killed them. Also known as the Chicxulub impact, or the K-Pg event, most people are familiar with the major crash roughly 66 million years ago after a comet or asteroid collided with our planet.
It was one of the most violent upheavals in Earth’s entire 4 billion year history....
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The word “Dinkinesh” is Amharic for “marvelous,” and the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh has lived up to its Ethiopian moniker: When the NASA spacecraft Lucy flew by what it had anticipated would be only one asteroid, it found two asteroids for the price of one.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy from the Boulder, Colorado, branch of the San-Antonio-based Southwest Research Institute, said in a statement....
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When on Tuesday scientists lifted the lid off of OSIRIS-REx — a spacecraft that recently visited Bennu, an asteroid which might collide with Earth in the year 2182 — the researchers found something so overwhelming, they literally “gasped” at the “scientific treasure box” just discovered inside.
Those quotes were taken from a post on X (formerly Twitter) by NASA’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) division, which is located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center....
Originally posted on salon.com
On Sunday, September 24 at approximately 10:42 EST, a NASA mission known as OSIRIS-REx will return to Earth after having collected samples from an asteroid named Bennu. Some experts also predict that 159 years from now, there’s a good chance Bennu could collide with Earth.
Such an event would be extremely unlucky for life on this planet, with potential for catastrophic destruction....
Originally posted on salon.com
There is an asteroid so large that a person could easily roam around it as if it was their individual home. That same asteroid is about to come awfully close to striking Earth, at least according to the NASA Asteroid Watch Dashboard, which exists to warn the Earth of the presence of NEOs (near earth objects)....
Originally posted on salon.com