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Search Results for 'meteorite'
Mars craters are sublime
Someday, Mars will stop surprising me. Today is not that day. The image below was taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been taking devastatingly high-res pictures of the Red Planet for many years. While passing over the edge of the Tharsis Shield — a huge uplifted region of Mars [...]
Desktop Project Part 17: Sculpting Martian dunes
[I have a lot of astronomy pictures I've saved to my computer's desktop, so I've pledged to post one every day in an attempt to regain control of my machine. I call this my Desktop Project.] Speaking of Martian winds… Mars is a pretty interesting place. A lot of the surface is covered in dust [...]
The cloudy impact of Sikhote Alin
As soon as I read the caption of this lovely, if frigid, picture I knew I was going to like it: it’s an Envisat image of clouds forming east of the Russian Sikhote Alin mountains: Sure, it’s pretty and all, but what’s so special about it? In 1947, a rain of iron fell on this [...]
Quadrantids meteor shower peaks – briefly – tonight
Tonight is one of the odder meteor showers of the years. Why is it odd? Well for one, it’s called the Quadrantids — named after a constellation that got redefined years ago and no longer exists. For another, the parent object of the shower isn’t a comet, it’s an asteroid that used to be a [...]
Fireball over Germany
[UPDATE: Turns out the fireball described below was the re-entry of the Soyuz booster that brought Expedition 30 up to the International Space Station a few days ago. Thanks to Marco Langbroek for alerting me to this!] [Update 2 (19:08 GMT): More footage, and a picture in a Dutch paper. Tip o' the Whipple Shield [...]
Lutetia may have witnessed the birth of the Earth
When we look at the solar system now, we see it after it’s had billions of years of evolution under its belt. Things have changed a lot since it first formed out a swirling disk of material, 4.5 billion years ago. We can make some pretty good guesses about the way things looked back then, [...]
Clair de Mercury
I know I just posted a MESSENGER photo of craters, but this one is different and spectacular enough that I figure, why not? I love a big, splashy, wide-angle shot of a rayed crater! So here’s the lovely, 80-km wide impact crater Debussy on the surface of Mercury: [Click to haphaestenate.] Craters make rays when [...]
Explosion in Argentina following a "ball of fire from the sky"
[Update: It looks like the cause of this was a gas bottle exploding, and not a meteorite. See the update for 21:15 UT below).] A deadly explosion and fire occurred in Argentina overnight, reportedly killing one woman and injuring several others. Two homes, a store, and several vehicles were destroyed or damaged. The thing is, [...]
Invaders from Vesta!
I did two related things yesterday: I wrote about the asteroid Vesta, and I went to the Denver Gem and Mineral show. How are those tied together? Glad you asked. In the last paragraph of the Vesta post, I said we have samples of Vesta that fell as meteorites. As it happens, they had a [...]
Vesta's odd bottom
Man, Vesta is weird. It’s a 500 km (300 mile) wide asteroid, the second biggest, so its gravity should be strong enough to crush it into a sphere. But it’s not a ball; it’s lumpy and stretched out and, weirdest of all, has an enormous circular depression at its south pole which flattens that entire [...]
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