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Amazon owner’s Blue Origin to buy asteroid mining company Honeybee Robotics

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Amazon owner Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company Blue Origin is to acquire a robotic asteroid mining startup called Honeybee Robotics.

Honeybee Robotics has operations in Longmont, Colorado and Altadena, California, and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Origin, headquartered in Kent, Washington.

The deal between Honeybee’s parent organization, Ensign-Bickford Industries, and Blue Origin is expected to close in mid-February. [Read more…] about Amazon owner’s Blue Origin to buy asteroid mining company Honeybee Robotics

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Planetary defense: Physicists propose new way to defend Earth against cosmic impacts

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Is Planetary Defense PI in the Sky?

In February of 2013, skywatchers around the world turned their attention toward asteroid 2012 DA14, a cosmic rock about 150 feet (50 meters) in diameter that was going to fly closer to Earth than the spacecraft that bring us satellite TV.

Little did they realize as they prepared for the once-in-several-decades event that another bit of celestial debris was hurtling toward Earth, with a more direct heading.

On February 15, 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor, a roughly 62-foot (19 meter)-diameter asteroid exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, as it entered Earth’s atmosphere at a shallow angle. The blast shattered windows and damaged buildings, and nearly two thousand people were hurt, though thankfully no one died. [Read more…] about Planetary defense: Physicists propose new way to defend Earth against cosmic impacts

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  • Did heat from impacts on asteroids provide the ingredients for life on Earth?
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    Did heat from impacts on asteroids provide the ingredients for life on Earth?A research group from Kobe University has demonstrated that the heat generated by the impact of a small astronomical body could enable aqueous alteration and organic solid formation to occur on the surface of an asteroid. They achieved this by first conducting high-velocity impact cratering experiments using an asteroid-like target…
    Tags: impact, asteroid, asteroids, earth, space

Volcanoes on Mars could be active

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Evidence of recent volcanic activity on Mars shows that eruptions could have taken place in the past 50,000 years, according to new study by researchers at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and the Planetary Science Institute.

Most volcanism on the Red Planet occurred between 3 and 4 billion years ago, with smaller eruptions in isolated locations continuing perhaps as recently as 3 million years ago. But, until now, there was no evidence to indicate Mars could still be volcanically active.

Using data from satellites orbiting Mars, researchers discovered a previously unknown volcanic deposit. They detail their findings in the paper “Evidence for geologically recent explosive volcanism in Elysium Planitia, Mars,” published in the journal Icarus. [Read more…] about Volcanoes on Mars could be active

Raindrops also keep fallin’ on exoplanets

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One day, humankind may step foot on another habitable planet. That planet may look very different from Earth, but one thing will feel familiar – the rain.

In a recent paper, Harvard researchers found that raindrops are remarkably similar across different planetary environments, even planets as drastically different as Earth and Jupiter.

Understanding the behavior of raindrops on other planets is key to not only revealing the ancient climate on planets like Mars but identifying potentially habitable planets outside our solar system. [Read more…] about Raindrops also keep fallin’ on exoplanets

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  • Reflecting sunlight could cool the Earth's ecosystem
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    Reflecting sunlight could cool the Earth's ecosystemResearchers in the Climate Intervention Biology Working Group – including Jessica Hellmann from the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment – explored the effect of solar climate interventions on ecology, and their results were published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences. Composed of climate scientists and ecologists from…
    Tags: solar, climate, earth, paper, cloud, space, understanding, sciences, university, surface

Water on ancient Mars

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There’s a long-standing question in planetary science about the origin of water on Earth, Mars and other large bodies such as the moon.

One hypothesis says that it came from asteroids and comets post-formation. But some planetary researchers think that water might just be one of many substances that occur naturally during the formation of planets.

A new analysis of an ancient Martian meteorite adds support for this second hypothesis. [Read more…] about Water on ancient Mars

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  • Early Earth was bombarded by series of city-sized asteroids
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    Early Earth was bombarded by series of city-sized asteroidsScientists know that the Earth was bombarded by huge impactors in distant time, but a new analysis suggest that the number of these impacts may have been x10 higher than previously thought. This translates into a barrage of collisions, similar in scale to that of the asteroid strike which wiped…
    Tags: impact, earth, years, ago, life, ancient, billion, time, universe
  • A blazar in the early universe
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    A blazar in the early universeThe supersharp radio "vision" of the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) has revealed previously unseen details in a jet of material ejected at three-quarters the speed of light from the core of a galaxy some 12.8 billion light-years from Earth. The galaxy, dubbed PSO J0309+27, is a…
    Tags: universe, earth, billion, years, team, international, researchers, analysis, science, news

Where were Jupiter and Saturn born?

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New work led by Carnegie’s Matt Clement reveals the likely original locations of Saturn and Jupiter.

These findings refine our understanding of the forces that determined our Solar System’s unusual architecture, including the ejection of an additional planet between Saturn and Uranus, ensuring that only small, rocky planets, like Earth, formed inward of Jupiter.

In its youth, our Sun was surrounded by a rotating disk of gas and dust from which the planets were born. The orbits of early formed planets were thought to be initially close-packed and circular, but gravitational interactions between the larger objects perturbed the arrangement and caused the baby giant planets to rapidly reshuffle, creating the configuration we see today. [Read more…] about Where were Jupiter and Saturn born?