If an asteroid hit Earth and all the humans died, would the dinosaurs come back? The Conversation’s Curious Kids podcast: Warpaint/Shutterstock Many, many years ago dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Six-year-old Aga knows that a meteorite wiped them out… but could another meteorite bring them back? You can read a print version of this story here. …
Osiris-Rex: Nasa reveals evidence of water and carbon in sample delivered to Earth from an asteroid: The "coal-like" material from Bennu. Nasa / Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebers On September 24 this year, a Nasa capsule parachuted down to Earth carrying a precious cache of material grabbed from an asteroid. The space agency has now …
Giant sea lizards: fossils in Morocco reveal the astounding diversity of marine life 66 million years ago, just before the asteroid hit: Sixty-six million years ago, the Cretaceous period ended. Dinosaurs disappeared, along with around 90% of all species on Earth. The patterns and causes of this extinction have been debated since palaeontology began. Was …
A Nasa spacecraft is on course to deliver material from an asteroid to Earth – here’s what we could learn: Nasa/GSFC Around 15 years ago, I was on a European Space Agency (Esa) committee, looking at Esa’s strategy for proposed forthcoming space missions. Under consideration was a mission to an asteroid. Over dinner, one of …
Flowering plants survived the dinosaur-killing asteroid – and may outlive us: Zamurovic Brothers/Shutterstock If you looked up 66 million years ago you might have seen, for a split second, a bright light as a mountain-sized asteroid burned through the atmosphere and smashed into Earth. It was springtime and the literal end of an era, the …
Asteroid City: Wes Anderson’s cosmic tale is his most engaging in years: Wes Anderson’s new film Asteroid City (2023) is a sci-fi dramedy following a grieving family stranded in a rural US town during a star-gazing event in the summer of 1955. However, it’s also a text by fictional playwright, Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), the …
Can we really deflect an asteroid by crashing into it? Nobody knows, but we are excited to try: Animation of the Dart mission. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL Nasa’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (Dart) spacecraft is designed to be a one hit wonder. It will end its days by crashing into an asteroid at 24,000 kilometres …
Mystery crater potentially caused by relative of dinosaur-killing asteroid: Kevin Gill/Flickr, CC BY-SA The ocean floor is famously less explored than the surface of Mars. And when our team of scientists recently mapped the seabed, and ancient sediments beneath, we discovered what looks like an asteroid impact crater. Intriguingly, the crater, named “Nadir” after the …
Asteroid sharing Earth’s orbit discovered – could it help future space missions?: Where 2020 XL5 would appear in the dawn sky if we could see it with the naked eye from Chile. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva, CC BY-NC-SA Research has shown that the Earth trails an asteroid barely a kilometre across in its orbit about the …
mRNA vaccines, asteroid missions and collaborative robots: what to watch in science in 2022 – podcast: mRNA vaccines: not just for COVID. Cryptographer/Shutterstock From new mRNA vaccines to space missions and developments in robotic automation, in this episode of The Conversation Weekly we talk to three experts about some scientific advances they’re watching out for …
Material from asteroid Ryugu starts to give up secrets of early Solar System: Image of Ryugu taken by the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft in 2018. JAXA/wikipedia, CC BY-SA Just over a year ago, material from the Japanese Hayabusa 2 mission to Asteroid (162173) Ryugu arrived back on Earth . And this week, the first two papers …
Nasa: imminent asteroid missions could reveal our origins – and help save Earth from deadly strike: DART will change the orbit of a moon around an asteroid. Nasa Asteroids are remnants of the early Solar System, with the potential to reveal secrets of our planet’s origins. But they could also bring an end to life …
How asteroid dust helped us prove life’s raw ingredients can evolve in outer space: A tiny speck of asteroid dust, circled, can only be manipulated by a glass needle. ISAS JAXA Scientists have long known that certain ingredients are needed to support life, especially water and key organic chemicals like carbon. In recent years, both …
Scientists have found dust from the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs inside the crater it left: A large impact. Shutterstock/Vadim Sadovski More than 99% of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. Most of these just died out quietly. However, in Earth’s history there have been five major mass extinction …
South Africa in the news: Asteroid 2-times size of Big Ben to pass Earth- NASA tracking ‘potentially hazardous’ rock: AN ASTEROID two and a half times bigger than Big Ben is currently making a close but safe, approach towards Earth, with astronomers deeming future approaches of the space rock to be “potentially …: “South Africa” …
Hayabusa 2: returning asteroid sample could help uncover the origins of life and the solar system: Artist impression of Hayabusa 2 approaching asteroid Ryugu. Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)/wikipedia, CC BY-SA What is your idea of an asteroid? Many people think of them as potato-shaped, inert and perhaps rather dull, pock-marked objects – …
Asteroid Bennu: successful touchdown – but sample return mission has only just begun: Artist's concept of the OSIRIS REx spacecraft collecting material from Bennu. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Relief showed clearly on the faces of the team of NASA scientists and engineers as they were told: “Touchdown is complete”. Then applause a few seconds later …
How we discovered that an asteroid collision in space 466m years ago boosted life on Earth: Trilobites evolved following the massive collision. Birger Schmidtz Something mysterious happened nearly half a billion years ago that triggered one of the most important changes in the history of life on Earth. Suddenly, there was an explosion of species, …