HackingTheUniverse

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Some asteroids that share the orbit of a larger body, such as a planet, without interfering with it, are known as “Trojans”. Lagrange points are orbital positions found near two objects, that allow a third object to remain in a balanced and stable position. There are two clusters of asteroids that have accumulated near Lagrange [...]

On Sunday, August 1, 2010, the side of the Sun facing the Earth erupted with a “coronal mass ejection” and a lot of other activity. This is a when a huge bubble of gas throws a large blob of plasma out into space and in this case it’s streaming toward Earth at a very high [...]

Building Planets – [nasa.gov] A beautiful artistic illustration of an asteroid belt (link above) shows a common misconception of asteroid spacing that is prevalent in both science fiction and the public mind. We love to watch Hans Solo or some other pilot skilfully guide a spaceship through the clutter of an asteroid field. But in [...]

NASA has been developing a robotic device that can function as an avatar for an astronaut, offering extravehicular telerobotic and telepresence capability. The astronaut will be able to operate the robot from inside the space station and perform “human-like” tasks using the robots hands and arms and sensors. The robonaut will be able to perform [...]

Astronomers have detected the spectrum signature of ice on an asteroid called 24 Themis in the main belt. They believe the thin coating of frost on the 200 kilometer wide rock is constantly being evaporated by the Sun and then replenished from an interior supply deep inside the rock. Astronomers Find Water On Asteroid’s Surface [...]

Dawn is a space probe that was launched in Sept of 2007 and has been thrusting it’s way toward the asteroid belt since then. It reached the edge of the main belt last November and now is poised to do some close up investigating of some of the larger asteroids. Dawn Sailing Smoothly Through The [...]

New Spacecraft Discovers Dozens of Asteroids … Every Day – [space.com] Dozens of asteroids that have been lurking undetected in our solar system are being discovered every day by NASA’s newest space telescope, scientists say. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope was designed to search for “dark” objects in space, such as brown dwarf [...]

21 Lutetia is a main belt asteroid, about 100 kilometers in diameter and classified spectrally as M-type or metallic. Rosetta is a space probe that will fly by 21 Lutetia in July of 2010. Rosetta was launched in 2004 and is on a mission to investigate a comet in 2014. On the way to that [...]

It is possible that one of the largest asteroid impacts in the history of the Earth has been located in Antarctica. A land mass concentration detected by satellite mapping of the gravitational field suggests a crater that is around 500 km in diameter (300 miles) and was probably created about 250 million years ago. It [...]

T Pyxidis is a binary star system just over 3,000 light years from us. The two stars in the system are a sun-like star and a white dwarf star. The strong gravity of the dwarf star draws material from it’s neighbor that periodically cause it to go “nova” or explode (at least partially). Historically, this [...]