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    Category Astronomy/Space

    Touchdown! NASA’s Mars Perseverance Rover Safely Lands on Red Planet

    February 18, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Biology/Biotechnology, Environment/Geology

    Members of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover team watch in mission control as the first images arrive moments after the spacecraft successfully touched down on Mars, Thursday, Feb. 18, 2021, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
    Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

    The largest, most advanced rover NASA has sent to another world touched down on Mars Thursday, after a 203-day journey traversing 293 million miles (472 million kilometers)...

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    Supercomputer Turns Back Cosmic Clock

    February 18, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Technology/Electronics

    Schematic diagram of the evolution of the Universe from the inflation (left) to the present (right). The “reconstruction method” winds back the evolution from right to left on this illustration to reproduce the primordial density fluctuations from the current galaxy distribution. (Credit: The Institute of Statistical Mathematics)

    Astronomers have tested a method for reconstructing the state of the early Universe by applying it to 4000 simulated universes using the ATERUI II supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). They found that together with new observations the method can set better constraints on inflation, one of the most enigmatic events in the history of the Universe...

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    The Comet that Killed the Dinosaurs

    February 17, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space, Environment/Geology

    Image result for New theory explains possible origin of plummeting Chicxulub impactor that struck off Mexico
    New theory explains possible origin of plummeting Chicxulub impactor that struck off Mexico

    New theory explains possible origin of the Chicxulub impactor. It was tens of miles wide and forever changed history when it crashed into Earth about 66 million years ago.

    The Chicxulub impactor, as it’s known, left behind a crater off the coast of Mexico that spans 93 miles and goes 12 miles deep. Its devastating impact brought the reign of the dinosaurs to an abrupt and calamitous end by triggering their sudden mass extinction, along with the end of almost three-quarters of the plant and animal species then living on Earth.

    The enduring puzzle has always been where the asteroid or comet that set off the destruction originated, and how it came to strike the Earth...

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    TESS discovers New Worlds in a River of Young Stars

    February 15, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration sketches out the main features of TOI 451, a triple-planet system located 400 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus.
    Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a trio of hot worlds larger than Earth orbiting a much younger version of our Sun called TOI 451. The system resides in the recently discovered Pisces-Eridanus stream, a collection of stars less than 3% the age of our solar system that stretches across one-third of the sky.

    The planets were discovered in TESS images taken between October and December 2018...

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