author, research scientist
The Deep Space Network’s Goldstone planetary radar had a busy few days observing asteroids 2024 MK and 2011 UL21 as they safely passed Earth. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently tracked two asteroids as they flew by our planet. One turned out to have a little moon orbiting it, while the…
Our solar system began to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Astronomers think small rocky and icy grains within the solar nebula began sticking together, growing into even larger objects. Although the process remains poorly understood, solid objects miles or more across eventually populated the disk. Astronomers call these bodies planetesimals. Within a million years…
NASA has released two white papers associated with the agency’s Moon to Mars architecture efforts. The papers, one on lunar mobility drivers and needs, and one on lunar surface cargo, detail NASA’s latest thinking on specific areas of its lunar exploration strategy. While NASA has established a yearly cadence of releasing new documents associated with…
During its flyby, Voyager 2 discovered 10 new moons (given such names as Puck, Portia, Juliet, Cressida, Rosalind, Belinda, Desdemona, Cordelia, Ophelia, and Bianca – obvious allusions to Shakespeare, continuing a naming tradition begun in 1787), two new rings in addition to the “older” nine rings, and a magnetic field tilted at 55 degrees off-axis…
Once upon a time, though, wind and water flowed across the red planet. Robotic rovers have found clear evidence that billions of years ago, lakes and rivers of liquid water coursed across the red...
The recent horizon imaging was conceived as an experiment many years ago during the landings of NASA’s Phoenix mission in 2008 and the Curiosity rover in 2012. As with other Mars landings before and...
The Greek god of war is named after Ares, who is the son of Zeus and Hera. God of fierce fighting and endless killing. The striking red color of the planet was already identified...
It’s also thought that the extremely close quarters allowed the universe’s very first particles to mix, mingle, and settle into roughly the same temperature. Then, in an unimaginably small fraction of a second, all that matter and energy expanded outward more or less evenly, with tiny variations provided by fluctuations on the quantum scale. That…