Sentences with phrase «good asteroid»

Much prospecting must be done to find out the composition and characteristics of potential asteroid targets, and determine whether the mining will be technically feasible and profitable so that miners can home in on the best asteroid candidates.

Not exact matches

«But we're lucky that the «Mud Dragon» got stuck in the muck, because its skeleton is one of the best examples of a dinosaur that was flourishing during those final few million years before the asteroid came down and changed the world in an instant.»

The few objects (moons, asteroids or comets) doing that can be explained rather well by gravitational disruption of orbits under close encounters with other objects, collisions and captures.

This should lead to tremendous advances in time - domain astronomy: studying fast - changing phenomena as they occur — black holes being born, supernovas exploding — as well as locating potentially Earth - threatening asteroids and mapping the little - understood population of objects orbiting out beyond Neptune.

From the origin of the universe (big bang), to the origin of the moon (big collision), to the origin of lunar craters (meteor strikes), to the demise of the dinosaurs (asteroid impact), to the numerous sudden downfalls of civilizations documented by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse, catastrophism is alive and well in mainstream science.

Well before an asteroid struck the planet some 66 million years ago, Earth was already in turmoil, a record from an ancient lakebed in northeastern China suggests.

It would crash into Bennu while OSIRIS - REx watches, the better to understand the feasibility of moving an asteroid with a battering ram.

While several members of Congress, including Rohrabacher, contend that a national prize program would help encourage the best amateur asteroid hunters, enthusiasts like Dyvig and Tucker don't need a financial incentive.

The mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth.

Despite the obstacles I discussed in this column last month, astronomers are rapidly developing better tools to find and track near - Earth asteroids.

Still, it is best to avoid breaking up the asteroid to begin with, if possible, because even if most of it reassembles, some stray fragments could still cause harm, she says.

If scientists can get a good handle on exactly how the thermal effects play out, they could steer a threatening asteroid into a safe orbit just by painting parts of its surface black (to absorb heat) or white (to reflect).

Or as Schweickart puts it, channeling his inner asteroid: «If you could prevent a 100 - meter object from wiping out the Bay Area and you don't do it, well, you ought to be strung up.»

Ceres is a dwarf planet, as well as an asteroid.

But in scenarios in which we have more warning time, asteroids» ability to reassemble would actually be a good thing, since fragments flying near Earth could still cause damage by knocking out satellites, Plesko says.

Scientists hope that studying asteroids might reveal more about the evolution of the solar system, as well as the origin of life on Earth.

The work also suggests — based on the sizes of other impact basins in the Moon, Mars and Mercury — that the early solar system was likely well stocked with protoplanet - sized asteroids.

In the better - preserved record from the past 550 million years, most asteroid strikes are not associated with any obvious die - offs, making the case of the dinosaurs something of an outlier.

If Chandrayaan - 2 is successful, it will pave the way for even more ambitious Indian missions, such as landings on Mars and an asteroid, as well as a Venus probe.

A large asteroid is a contained, well - defined threat.

Engineer Josh Hopkins of Lockheed Martin, who recently participated in a Washington, D.C., conference devoted to asteroid exploration, agrees that the project would provide «good practice and a learning experience for Mars.»

Although cryovolcanoes probably exist on Pluto, and there are hints as well on Titan, this peculiar, 4 - kilometer - tall mountain on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is the real thing, say researchers with NASA's Dawn spacecraft in one of six papers published today in Science.

O'Neill was convinced that building colonies that orbited the Earth was the best way to harvest the mineral riches of asteroids and provide a home for the burgeoning millions of Earth.

Such a sequence of events, on a much larger scale, may explain the birth of our own Moon in the early days of the Solar System, as well as the origin of many other satellites around planets and asteroids.

As a result, most asteroids — as well as comets and small moons — live out their days as static, irregularly shaped worlds.

Well before the rocky planets formed, recent research suggests, ice - infused asteroids were forged beyond Jupiter and subsequently swarmed the inner solar system.

He presents debunked hypotheses — the moon as a captured asteroid — as well as the reigning theory, which posits that a massive collision between Earth and a Mars - size meteor left us with our beguiling satellite.

«The optical telescopes play an important role, as their observations can be used to improve our prediction of the orbital path, as well as provide data that helps us establish the rotation rate of an asteroid,» said Chodas.

As part of its effort to find asteroids hazardous to Earth and destinations for future robotic and human exploration, NASA's NEO program will continue to search for even better potential targets for ARM.

May 8: Ceres, the largest asteroid, makes its best appearance of the year.

NASA also released a request for information (RFI) that invites industry and potential partners to offer ideas on accomplishing NASA's goal to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid, as well as find and plan for asteroid threats.

A good diet and strenuous exercise minimise the damage, but no one knows how the human body will fare on long - term missions to an asteroid, for example, or Mars.

He and his colleagues have found layers of rock from the end of the Triassic that are loaded with iridium, a marker rare on Earth but common in asteroids, as well as spores of ferns, which would have quickly sprouted after an asteroid impact wiped out the world's forests.

We've never had to deflect an incoming asteroid before it hits Earth, so how do we know the best way to do it?

The timetable for NASA's longer - term projects is more handwavy — the Obama administration talks vaguely about missions to an asteroid around 2025 and Mars around 2030 — but the agency is working on a well - defined program, called the Space Launch System, to develop powerful rockets for interplanetary travel, whatever the destination.

«So, if I wanted to have something named for me, an asteroid would be a good bet?»

Although astronomer David Jewitt of the Institute for Astronomy in Hawaii thinks Rabinowitz has done a good job counting the big asteroids, he is more worried about the hundreds of thousands of rocks smaller than 1 kilometer but larger than 100 meters.

Even better, though, would be a spot far away from the warmly glowing dust left over from asteroid collisions in the inner solar system.

In your editorial (7 July, p 5) you assume that the $ 1 million it would take to keep an asteroid - spotting telescope going for five more years is good value.

In the Solar System, the asteroid belt contains the leftover building blocks for the terrestrial planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, so planetary scientists study the asteroids to gain a better understanding of how rocky, and potentially habitable planets are formed.

To many, the moon is passé, and President Obama's plan to visit a near - Earth asteroid seems a sideshow at best.

While strictly speaking a science mission to better understand the nature and origins of a primitive solar system building block, OSIRIS - REx dovetails nicely with President Barack Obama's plans to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025.

If that's an example of the kind of data available from probing the asteroid fragments in these heretofore hidden small craters, he adds, then they're well worth the search.

The images depict crew operations including the Orion spacecraft's trip to and rendezvous with the relocated asteroid, as well as astronauts maneuvering through a spacewalk to collect samples from the asteroid.

The space agency's rush to capture an asteroid for its astronauts can only lead to no good, critics argue at workshop

Well, Vulcan doesn't exist — Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity explains Mercury's orbit — but asteroids known as vulcanoids could, circling so close to the sun that we can't see them in its glare.

Yet without better detection and tracking there will inevitably be uncertainty about asteroid positions in the future — and even greater expense if the uncertainty leads to unnecessary efforts to thwart an apparent pressing threat.

«If we know from reconnaissance that it's a stony asteroid or a nickel - iron asteroid,» explains Remo, «we can have a pretty good idea in advance how it will respond to an X-ray blast.»

Small towns facing the impact of an asteroid 30 meters across (about 98 feet) may fare best by evacuating.

The machine offered Remo his best hopes for figuring out how the X-rays from a nuclear blast would interact with, and possibly deter, incoming asteroids of varying compositions.