REAL TO REEL
On 23 July 2021, the world watched as the long overdue and somewhat subdued opening ceremony of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games got underway in Japan — and while not the greatest show on Earth this year, it certainly delivered the greatest Earth on show, for it was the day the Earth appeared over Tokyo. …
On 11 July, 2021, Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, took a suborbital flight to the inner edge of outer space, reaching an altitude of 86 km (54 miles) above the surface of the Earth. Although it marked a milestone for space tourism, where that milestone marker should be placed is an ongoing matter …
NASA and Arizona State University, along with other partners, are working on a project to send a spacecraft to investigate the unique asteroid 16 Psyche, an assumed metal-rich body about the size of Switzerland orbiting in the asteroid belt at an average distance of 2.9 AU from the Sun. What is unique about asteroid Psyche …
A useful graphic showing the largest objects in the asteroid belt — the first 22 objects in decreasing size from dwarf planet 1 Ceres to 7 Iris ...
Apparently, if you smell a fresh meteorite it smells like sulphur, according to reports about the Tagish Lake meteorite and the aroma that filled the air during its fall in 2000. And the Aguas Zarcas meteorite that fell in Costa Rica in 2019 has been said to smell of compost, vanilla and Brussels sprouts, depending …
Graphics showing all of the asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft...
From active asteroids to dormant comets, rubble piles to remnant cores, main belt comets and manx comets to ambiguous interstellar objects, this article provides a brief overview of the smaller objects in our planetary zoo—the main differences and similarities between asteroids and comets. But if it's meteors you're looking for, read Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites. …
The Walkie-Talkie building is a skyscraper in the City of London, located at 20 Fenchurch Street. It switched on its lights in 2014 — and has been messing with sunlight ever since. The building sits slightly away from the main cluster of the city's skyscrapers as if banished, poking up out of a group of …
So there's another apocalyptic asteroid warning in the tabloid news headlines. The lead scaremongerer in the UK is the Daily Express, who started out playfully alerting us to asteroids that will skim by Earth in the coming days. It didn't take long for a war of the digital world to start warning of swarms of …
I once read a quote in a conference abstract that stated the paper had been written to serve as “a historical guide to the asteroid literature for the perplexed”. That quote aptly sums up my desire for writing a piece on the history of asteroid classification and taxonomies, and the schemes currently in use (in …
Many people will remember the day in 2013 when one asteroid stole the limelight from another. On 15 February 2013, all eyes of astronomers were on the close approach of a 30 metre-sized Apollo asteroid 367943 Duende (then known as 2012 DA14). The asteroid was not expected to be visible to the naked eye. Nor …
Continue reading "Real and Simulated Asteroid and Comet Impacts"
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a moviemaker with a large rock heading for Earth must ignore the laws of physics and make things behave the way moviegoers want, otherwise no-one will watch it. And so asteroids and comets are called meteors, and meteoroids and meteors are called meteorites, and meteorites are called...well…meteorites, actually. The …
