Sentences with phrase «with small asteroids»

Rather than random occurrences, many large airbursts might result from collisions between Earth and streams of debris associated with small asteroids or comets.

This concept images shows ARM robotic capture Option B, in which the robotic vehicle ascends from the surface of a large asteroid, on its way to a lunar distant retrograde orbit with a smaller asteroid mass in its clutches.

One possibility is that a slow - motion collision with a smaller asteroid or comet once blasted debris into orbit, and the gravitational pull of the largest bits of debris have shepherded the smaller bits into a sharply defined ring.

Not exact matches

How NASA could capture an asteroid: A probe approaches and aligns with a small space rock (above), then unfurls what amounts to a high - tech bag and slips it around the target.

Although 2003 EH1 now resembles an asteroid, Jenniskens thinks it was an active comet that disintegrated about 500 years ago, leaving behind a small and mostly inactive nugget, along with a dense trail of dust.

But if Jupiter were still smaller, it would have flung fewer asteroids toward the inner solar system to begin with — and the dinosaurs might still be walking our planet.

Recent observations have revealed that it is spherical, unlike the irregular shapes of smaller asteroids with less gravity.

Due to their small size and irregular shape, they strongly resembled asteroids, but no one understood how Mars could have» captured» them and made them into satellites with almost circular and equatorial orbits.

It envisions the great reshuffling as a brief, violent affair that not only put the outer planets where they are today but also created the Kuiper belt of small icy bodies beyond Neptune, gave the planets scores of oddly orbiting moons, and bombarded the solar system with a rain of asteroids and comets so fierce that it would have cooked all but the deepest subterranean life on early Earth.

Small asteroids hit our planet's atmosphere with surprising frequency.

The GBT images also confirmed the presence of a small moon - like companion zipping around the asteroid, which was previously detected with ground - based optical telescopes by Joe Pollock of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and Petr Pravec of Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic.

The report, which came out in January and with which Boslough otherwise fully agrees, reveals that the scientific inventory of Earth - threatening space objects (asteroids and comets), especially the smaller ones that are most likely to impact our planet, is far from complete and unlikely to improve significantly without a greatly increased funds for NEO search programs.

In October of 1990 a very small asteroid struck the Pacific Ocean with a blast about the size of the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, killing roughly thousands of people in seconds.

A map released by NASA reveals that small asteroids frequently enter and disintegrate in the Earth's atmosphere with random distribution around the globe.

«If the D - to - H value changes with time, it would be misleading to assume that comets contributed only a small fraction of Earth's water compared to asteroids,» Paganini said, «especially, if these are based on a single measurement of the D - to - H value in cometary water.»

Kamuela, HI — Combining observations from the world's largest telescopes with small telescopes used by amateur astronomers, a team of scientists discovered that the large main - belt asteroid (87) Sylvia has a complex interior, thanks to the presence of two moons orbiting the main asteroid, and probably linked to the way the multiple system was formed.

Asteroids and comets that formed in the outer disk beyond the carbon - oxygen fire must have brought what carbon (along with water) that Earth now has in large as well as very small impactors («cosmic fluff,» Duprat et al, 2010) over the past 4.6 billion years.

Therefore, smaller telescopes with a much wider field of view are used to detect asteroids.

Once the probes have identified asteroids with valuable resources, other spacecraft will be dispatched to stage small - scale tests of the mining technology.

Its bulk would either send a small asteroid on a different trajectory, or in the case of a bigger one, it would be fitted with a nuclear weapon that would do its job (hopefully, for everyone alive at the time) with a bang.

«Given how large planets are, the addition of a supply from something as small as a typical or even large comet or asteroid would be such a tiny fraction of the total atmosphere that it would be quite insufficient, like trying to fan a huge bonfire with a single, gentle puff.

Traditionally, the solar system has been divided into planets (the big bodies orbiting the Sun), their satellites (a.k.a. moons, variously sized objects orbiting the planets), asteroids (small dense objects orbiting the Sun) and comets (small icy objects with highly eccentric orbits).

In an earlier study, also published in MNRAS, researchers concluded that small bodies such as asteroids are more likely to be flung out of binary star systems than systems with single stars (like the solar system).

«Recent spacecraft studies of Comet 67P / Churyumov - Gerasimenko with Rosetta and of [asteroid] Ceres... provide evidence that complex organic molecules and even amino acids are ubiquitous on small bodies in the solar system and that water ice is abundant in the asteroid belt.»

«While Ceres is a lot bigger than the candidate asteroids that NASA is working on sending humans to, many of these smaller bodies are produced by collisions with larger asteroids such as Ceres and Vesta.

The game's second boss is a giant flaming boulder that splits into two, smaller boulders every time its health is depleted, until the environment is rippling with fiery ball bearings - which brings Asteroids to mind.

One thing this game does incredibly well is to keep you on your toes, as you'll be dodging enemy fire and the enemies themselves, along with asteroids and meteors at a near constant pace throughout the entire game, with small breaks between each stage.

The game will be set on a massive asteroid, with smaller ones raining down on the map.

It's indeed a space shooter where you shoot larger asteroids and break them into smaller asteroids, where you (eventually) face down more sophisticated enemies, but if you want to follow the original source material, you're going to need the «tank» style turn controls, with the added benefit of forward and reverse thrusters to fine tune your fancy flight and trajectory.

Beyond the tutorial, there are 20 missions and 2 bonus missions that task the player with protecting the mothership from ever increasing quantities of small to large asteroids totalling to 66 stars that can be gained.

We join our nomad as he embarks on the investigation of a small cluster of four planets in the omega sector, after a collision with a rogue asteroid damaged his warp core.

While I'm posting (I can see how you guys get into this) I'm also very uncomfortable with your notion of «tacit knowledge:» it certainly seems to be tacit knowledge in the blogosphere that the chances of the climate sensitivity (equilibrium warming on indefinite stabilization at 560ppm CO2, for the non-enthusiasts) being greater than or equal to 6 degrees are too small to be worth worrying about (meaning down at the level of an asteroid strike).

The reason I stuck with it is that it's hard to find a demographer or other expert on population and social trends who sees even a small chance of humankind's peaking at anything lower than nine billion — barring some catastrophic epidemic or asteroid strike.

It's the same issue raised by people arguing against blowing up an asteroid, that it turns a single small cannonball into a very large shotgun blast with the same total energy being delivered and delivering it to the atmosphere is still a problem.

«If the asteroid is small enough, and we detect it early enough, we can do it with the impactor,» physicist David Dearborn told BuzzFeed.