Planets, Comets, Asteroids, etc.

[AndyinPA]

I had heard about this. I wouldn't have to drive too far.

[FiveAcres]

We saw the totality in Nebraska in 2017. It was awesome, and was another item off the bucket list.

[much ado]

We saw the totality in Nebraska in 2017. It was awesome, and was another item off the bucket list.

Yeah, we drove up to eastern Oregon. It was fantastic.

[much ado]

I thought this was really interesting...

Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of How the Mayan Calendar Works

We were thinking too small all along.

[AndyinPA]

Absolutely!

[RTH10260]

I thought this was really interesting...

Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of How the Mayan Calendar Works

We were thinking too small all along.

I was going to comment on the 45 year cycle and relate it to the probable life span, but a commenter already made the observation:

kar4905

Its interesting to consider that the average human lifespan in that time period is probably 45 years. Therefore tracing the planetary movements from birth to death, making it not only a calendar but also a sort of horoscope for an individual or preist.

I was going to comment on the 45 year cycle and relate it to the probable life span, but a commenter already made the observation:

[RTH10260]

Rock that punched hole in New Jersey house confirmed to be 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite

Sharmila Kuthunur
Sat, May 13, 2023 at 12:00 PM GMT+2

A metallic-looking rock that smashed through the roof of a residential home in New Jersey’s Hopewell Township earlier this week is indeed a meteorite — a rare one about 4.6 billion years old, scientists confirmed on Thursday (May 11).

"It was obvious right away from looking at it that it was a meteorite in a class called stony chondrite," Nathan Magee, chair of the physics department at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), whose office was contacted by the Hopewell Township police soon after the rock was found on Monday (May 8), told Space.com.

Chondrites are primitive rocks that make up 85% of meteorites found on Earth. Most chondrites found to date have been discovered in Antarctica; only rarely does one crash in populated areas.
The New Jersey rock, which is about 6 inches long by 4 inches wide (15 by 10 centimeters), is a notable exception. It slammed into the Hopewell Township house, dented the floorboard, punched two holes in the ceiling and was still warm when it was discovered by Suzy Kop in her father's bedroom around noon on Monday.

"I'm looking up on the ceiling and there's these two holes, and I'm like, 'What in the world has happened here?'" Kop told 6 ABC's Trish Hartman.

Once emergency responders cleared Kop, her family and their home of any harmful radioactive residues, Kop handed over the space rock to the nearby college for further inspection.

At TCNJ, Magee's team consulted Jerry Delaney, a retired meteorite expert who had worked on the meteorite collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The team confirmed the space rock to be about 4.56 billion years old, which means it has been around since the beginning of our solar system and represents the leftover fragments from its creation.

The 2.2-pound (0.9 kilograms) meteorite, which will likely be named Titusville, NJ — the postal address closest to its landing site — is "in excellent condition, and one of a very small number of similar witnessed chondrite falls known to science," Magee said in a statement on Thursday.

The top layer of the meteorite has a blackened crust a few millimeters thick from partially burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Using a hand lens designed to look at rocks closely, his team found that the meteroite's minerals are blue and gray in color, with a small amount of other metals mixed in, Magee told Space.com.




https://www.yahoo.com/news/rock-punched ... 14847.html

(original: Space)

[RTH10260]

Pebbles from an Asteroid Are about to Be Delivered to Earth, and It’s Totally Awesome
The OSIRIS-REx mission will return samples from the asteroid Bennu that could rewrite our solar system’s history

By Clara Moskowitz on July 1, 2023
Scientific American July 2023 Issue

What would it be like to hold a piece of outer space in your hand? Some lucky scientists will find out soon when NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft (shorthand for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) returns from its seven-year mission. The probe will drop off a canister holding about a cup of pebbles and dust from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. “Bennu is a time capsule of the early solar system, and we're cracking it open,” says Amy Hofmann, an isotope geochemist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is a co-investigator on the mission. “We get to be the first people to see what's in there. I'm getting goose bumps talking about this.”

Hofmann is one of around 200 scientists who will receive portions of the cargo OSIRIS-REx brings back. On September 24 the probe is set to release its sample return capsule, which will barrel through Earth's atmosphere and make a parachute landing at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. If all goes well, recovery teams will helicopter it to a portable clean room to remove its heat shield and back shell and then fly it to a specially prepared facility at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Scientists there will carefully open the inner container, handling it inside a glove box to keep out all contaminants, to retrieve some of the only pristine primordial bits of asteroid ever to reach Earth's surface. (Meteorites are great, too, but their unprotected burn through our atmosphere alters them.)

The samples will reveal the state of the solar system when it was first forming, including which amino acids and other chemical compounds important for biology were present. “The ‘O’ in ‘OSIRIS-REx’ is really for the origin of life,” says Dante S. Lauretta of the University of Arizona, the mission's principal investigator. “We want to understand the role that these carbon-rich asteroids played in delivering the precursors of life to Earth.”

OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016 and arrived at Bennu in 2018. It spent two years near the space rock, making measurements with its onboard cameras, spectrometers, and other instruments. Those scans revealed a lot about Bennu, including that it's more like a pile of loosely bound rubble than a solid object and that it holds water-bearing minerals. But the real payoff will be the samples. “We have access to the absolute state-of-the-art technology here on Earth,” says co-investigator Michelle Thompson, a planetary scientist at Purdue University. “Having time, having this huge team and the ability to do coordinated analyses, to look at the same sample with multiple different techniques—there's really nothing that can replace that. Sample return is a cornerstone of planetary science.”

In October 2020 the spacecraft made a close approach to the asteroid, briefly touching the surface with its Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM), a robotic arm that fired a burst of nitrogen gas to stir up dust and rock, which it then funneled into its collector head. “It looks like an air filter, except we brought the air,” Lauretta says. Photographs taken during the collection process suggest the mission scooped up plenty of material. Some extra bits of sample even got stuck to the outside of the TAGSAM.




https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... y-awesome/

[AndyinPA]

Cool!

[roadscholar]

Totally.

[RTH10260]

Earth could have been gone and nobody would notice it ....

A skyscraper-size asteroid flew closer to Earth than the moon — and scientists didn't notice until 2 days later

By Brandon Specktor
published 6 days ago

A stealthy asteroid the size of a 20-story building hid in the sun's glare before zooming uncomfortably close to Earth on July 13. Scientists didn't notice until July 15.

An asteroid as large as a 20-story building sailed uncomfortably close to Earth last week, zooming by our planet at roughly a quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon — and astronomers didn't notice it until two days later.

Now dubbed 2023 NT1, the roughly 200-foot-wide (60 meters) space rock sailed past our planet on July 13, traveling at an estimated 53,000 mph (86,000 km/h), according to NASA. However, because the rock flew toward Earth from the direction of the sun, our star's glare blinded telescopes to the asteroid's approach until long after it had passed.

Astronomers didn't catch wind of the building-size rock until July 15, when a telescope in South Africa — part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), an array of telescopes designed to spot asteroids several days to weeks before any potential impact — caught the rock making its exit from our neighborhood. More than a dozen other telescopes also spotted the rock shortly afterward, according to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center.




https://www.livescience.com/space/aster ... days-later

[AndyinPA]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... ins-carbon

Scientists excited to find ocean of one of Jupiter’s moons contains carbon

Discovery adds weight to view that Europa’s ocean could be most promising place in solar system to look for alien life

The vast subterranean ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, contains carbon, one of the crucial ingredients for life, scientists have discovered.

The observations, by the James Webb space telescope, indicate that carbon dioxide ice on the moon’s surface originated from the salty ocean that lies beneath a 10-mile thick crust of ice. Although the findings do not answer the question of whether alien life is lurking in the cold, gloomy depths, they add weight to the view that Europa’s ocean could be the most promising place in the solar system to go looking for it.

“This is a big deal and I am very excited by it,” said Dr Christopher Glein, a geochemist at Southwest Research Institute, in Texas, US, and co-author. “We don’t know yet if life is actually present in Europa’s ocean. But this new finding adds evidence to the case that Europa’s ocean would be a good bet for hosting extant life. That environment looks tantalising from the perspective of astrobiology.”

At 2,000 miles wide, Europa is slightly smaller than Earth’s moon. Hypothetical lifeforms would have to contend with some extreme adversities, including surface temperatures than rarely exceed -140C and incoming radiation from Jupiter. But, Europa’s ocean – 40-100 miles (64-160km) deep, 10 to 15 miles beneath its icy surface – has made the moon a leading contender in the search for life. The deep ocean’s potential habitability depends on its chemistry, including the abundance of biologically essential elements such as carbon.

[Foggy]

I suspect there's no life below 10 miles of ice in a place that gets virtually zero sunlight.

And I'm a big fan of life being tenacious and amazingly varied and so forth, but life on Earth didn't originate in such unfavorable conditions. Maybe after the Sun goes red giant ...

[Frater I*I]

I suspect there's no life below 10 miles of ice in a place that gets virtually zero sunlight.

And I'm a big fan of life being tenacious and amazingly varied and so forth, but life on Earth didn't originate in such unfavorable conditions. Maybe after the Sun goes red giant ...

Ahhhemmm......

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/perman ... rmal-vents

[Foggy]

You prove my point, good sir.

If you don't have light, life can still develop using heat alone. This was huge scientific news when it was discovered, and it really is an incredible thing.

But they have heat down there in them thermal vents. I have seen no evidence of thermal vents on Europa, and I very much doubt that it gets really warm at the center of the moon, because there's no obvious source of any heat. That's what it means to be under 10 miles of ice and 483.6 million miles away from the Sun (thank you, Alexa).

I could be wrong, but a better use of all that carbon on Europa is to make it into gasoline and feed it into internal combustion engines, yay!

[northland10]

The moon Europa has a more productive Congress than the US.

[Estiveo]

Europa very likely has thermal vents in the liquid water ocean under its ice. Why?

Io.

If Io has volcanic activity, which it demonstrably does, Europa having thermal vents isn't a stretch, especially since they both share orbital resonance, and tidal thermal heating of their cores, along with Ganymede. (Which also likely has a liquid water ocean, but between icy layers, so probably no life despite that molten metal core.)

[keith]

Europa very likely has thermal vents in the liquid water ocean under its ice. Why?

Io.

If Io has volcanic activity, which it demonstrably does, Europa having thermal vents isn't a stretch, especially since they both share orbital resonance, and tidal thermal heating of their cores, along with Ganymede. (Which also likely has a liquid water ocean, but between icy layers, so probably no life despite that molten metal core.)

While I share your enthusiasm for extraterrestrial life, I must point out that "isn't a stretch" does not equate in any way what-so-ever to "very likely".

[Foggy]

I am going to add that, as much as I love life and think it's the most amazing thing in the University, there's life and then there's sentient life.

To the average Earthling on the street, nothing could be more boring than the discovery of one-celled amoebas on another planet (or moon, as the case may be). Critters like that don't do anything but reproduce and watch sports on Tee Vee. Do they get ESPN?

Now, the discovery of sentient life would be a galaxy-shattering event, especially if they already have McDonald's up there under the ten miles of ice. I bet they haven't bothered to invent air conditioning.

'Course, we could practice digging through ten miles of ice in Antarctica. OK, the ice in Antarctica is only 8 miles thick (this week, but act now while supplies last). But you get the picture.

[Foggy]

Yeah, Estiveo is right, though. If there's heat, then maybe one-celled critters are possible. And there's something about the accretion of mass that results in the formation of a planet, or moon, that causes a lot of heat in the center of the whatever. The center of the Earth is so hot, it really isn't "molten iron". It's plasma, which is an entirely different - and hotter - thing.

So maybe there's a lot of heat near the center of Europa. Not enough heat to melt the ten miles of ice, but enough to warm the ocean beneath the ice. In which case there could be life under there.

But I very much doubt that it happened. I don't think we will find even one-celled amoebas.

[Foggy]

In actual fact, nobody knows what the core of the Earth is.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-ear ... arths-core

[Liz]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... ins-carbon

Scientists excited to find ocean of one of Jupiter’s moons contains carbon
Discovery adds weight to view that Europa’s ocean could be most promising place in solar system to look for alien life
The vast subterranean ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons, contains carbon, one of the crucial ingredients for life, scientists have discovered.

"Warning! Danger, Will Robinson".... Hal 9000
"All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa. Attempt No Landing There. Use Them Together. Use Them in Peace."

[Estiveo]

Europa very likely has thermal vents in the liquid water ocean under its ice. Why?

Io.

If Io has volcanic activity, which it demonstrably does, Europa having thermal vents isn't a stretch, especially since they both share orbital resonance, and tidal thermal heating of their cores, along with Ganymede. (Which also likely has a liquid water ocean, but between icy layers, so probably no life despite that molten metal core.)

While I share your enthusiasm for extraterrestrial life, I must point out that "isn't a stretch" does not equate in any way what-so-ever to "very likely".

Were you under the impression I was presenting a peer reviewed article, or do you just like being obtuse?

[Foggy]

Oops, somebody woke up cranky. Keith wasn't peer reviewing, he was just pointing out that possible and likely are not the same, and that's where I am too also.

You are very right, I do believe, that life on (in?) Europa is possible. But I think it is highly unlikely.

On the bright side, if I'm wrong then there's life on one of Jupiter's moons, which would be awesomeness.

[Estiveo]