NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

  1. Content with the tag: “meteorites

  2. Getting WISE About Nemesis


    Artist concept of the NASA WISE mission. Image: NASA/JPLArtist concept of the NASA WISE mission. Image: NASA/JPL
    Is our Sun part of a binary star system? An unseen companion star, nicknamed “Nemesis,” may be sending comets towards Earth. Throughout history, such impacts could have had a profound effect on the evolution of the biosphere by causing regular mass extinctions. If Nemesis exists, NASA’s new WISE telescope should be able to spot it.

    Source: [astrobio.net]

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  3. Age of the Solar System Needs to Be Recalculated


    A new paper in Science from NAI’s Arizona State University team indicates that a trusted equation for calculating the age of the solar system may need rewriting. The team’s measurements show that one of the equation’s assumptions — that certain kinds of uranium always appear in the same relative quantities in meteorites — is wrong.

    The differences in the quantities of uranium could mean that current estimates of the age of the solar system overshoot that age by 1 million years or more. Historical estimates place the age at about 4.5 billion years—a number that is not...

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    Source: [Wired Magazine]

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  4. Marco Polo and Meteorites


    Asteroids and comets have been a major focus of recent NASA missions. From Deep Impact to Stardust, and the current Dawn mission, astrobiologists have been examining these fascinating celestial bodies in order to understand the role they may have played in the origin of life on our planet. These rocks in space are also ancient records from a time when our solar system was being born. The wealth of scientific information that can be gleaned from asteroids has also sparked interest from space agencies outside of the United States....

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    Source: [Astrobiology Magazine]

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  5. Arctic, Antarctic, Mars


    The city of Hammerfest lies at the northern tip of Norway, well above the Arctic Circle. If you board a ship heading north from there, just before you reach the polar ice cap you run into a group of islands known as the Svalbard archipelago.

    For the past two summers, a group of scientists has traveled to the largest of these islands to study an environment that sheds light on a notorious meteorite, discovered at the opposite end of the Earth, in Antarctica.

    The meteorite, ALH84001, began as a rather unremarkable piece of volcanic rock that formed about 4.5 billion...

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