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Search Results for 'meteorite'
Peruvian "meteor" freaks out media
A few days ago, the web was abuzz with something that looked like a very large meteor burning up over Peru. Here’s video from ITN news: You can find similar videos on Youtube. However, is it actually a meteor? Cutting to the chase, I don’t think so. I don’t have a lot of solid evidence [...]
Vesta's double whammy
The Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the main belt asteroid Vesta just a few weeks ago, and images are coming back in dribs and drabs. NASA just released this fantastic one, taken by Dawn’s wide-angle camera: [Click to protoplanetate.] Pretty cool, eh? Vesta is about 500 km (300 miles) across, so you’re seeing about half [...]
More evidence of flowing water on Mars!
For the past few years, tantalizing evidence has been found that Mars — thought to be long dead, dry, and lifeless — may have pockets of water just beneath the surface. To be clear, we know there’s water on Mars, in the form of ice. We see ice in the polar caps, and we’ve seen [...]
Shooting satellites, new and old
I’ve mentioned in the past that the International Space Station is easily visible to the unaided eye when it passes through the sky. That means it’s not hard to get pictures of it. Unless you have pretty fancy equipment you’ll only see it as a bright dot of light, but that’s still pretty cool, and [...]
A flower bloom on the Moon
If I ask you to close your eyes and picture a crater on the Moon, I bet what would come to your mind is a bowl-shaped depression, a raised rim, and maybe a central peak. You might also picture the surrounding area, which looks pretty featureless except for other craters. I would also bet you [...]
Lunar craters, young and old
This is a pretty neat picture taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: two craters, side by side: [Click to impactenate.] What’s cool about it is the obvious age discrepancy between the two craters. The Moon lacks water and air, but it has erosion nonetheless: micrometeorite impacts, solar wind, and even thermal stress cause by the [...]
2011 JREF Pigasus awards
Every year, the James Randi Educational Foundation picks the people or organizations who have done the most to promote antireality nonsense and get the public to believe in provably untrue silliness. This dubious honor is called the Pigasus Award after Randi’s official mascot, the flying pig, as in "XXX will be true when pigs fly" [...]
Blast site blastocyte
If you follow me on Twitter you may have figured out I’m otherwise occupied for right now, and have spotty internet access. But I happened to have a connection for a few minutes, and got a press release from the folks at Rutgers and the Chandra X-Ray Center about a supernova remnant, and the picture [...]
Followup thoughts on the meteorite fossils claim
On Saturday I posted about the claims of Richard Hoover, a NASA scientist who says he has found evidence of fossilized microbes in a meteorite. As soon as I saw the story (thanks to a tweet from my friend Sheril) I knew the ‘net would explode with the news, so I wrote a quick post [...]
Has life been found in a meteorite?
[UPDATE (March 7, 2011): I've posted a followup on this news with a much more detailed analysis, and not too surprisingly the scientific consensus coming in is that the claims of alien fossils are way wrong.] Richard Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, thinks he may have found bacteria in a meteorite. [...]
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