Category Astronomy/Space

In this concept image, the Orion spacecraft docks with the robotic asteroid redirect vehicle.

Plans to develop a robotic solar-powered spacecraft capable of displacing a near-Earth asteroid towards lunar orbit for ease of study proposed. Future space exploration aims to fly further from Earth than ever before. Now, Italian Space Agency scientists have expressed an interest in contributing to the development of robotic technologies to bring an asteroid from beyond lunar orbit back into closer reach in order to better study it. In a paper published in EPJ Plus, Marco Tantardini and Enrico Flamini from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) make the case for taking part in the robotic phase of the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM)...

Map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey. The map covers about 1/30th of the entire sky and spans several billion light-years in extent. Red regions have more dark matter than average, blue regions less dark matter. Credit: Chihway Chang of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and the DES collaboration.

Imagine planting a single seed and, with great precision, being able to predict the exact height of the tree that grows from it. Now imagine traveling to the future and snapping photographic proof that you were right...

Artist’s depiction of a neutron star. Credit Credit: NASA

Astronomers like to say we are the byproducts of stars, stellar furnaces that long ago fused hydrogen and helium into the elements needed for life through the process of stellar nucleosynthesis. As the late Carl Sagan once put it: “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” But what about the heavier elements in the periodic chart, elements such as gold, platinum and uranium?

Astronomers believe most of these “r-process elements” – elements much heavier than iron – were created, either in the aftermath of the collapse of massive stars and the associated supernova explosions, or in the merging of b...

Astronomers have identified the oldest asteroid families and, by process of elimination, the oldest intact asteroids in the main belt. A team including SwRI scientists developed a technique to identify ancient asteroid families that have drifted apart. Asteroid surfaces heat up during the day (as illustrated by this image) and cool down at night, giving off radiation that can act as a sort of mini-thruster. This force can cause asteroids to drift widely over time, making it difficult to identify families of fragments leftover after asteroid collisions eons ago. Credit: Image Courtesy of NASA/GSFC

Discoveries include a void in the main belt and the oldest family of asteroids...