Meteors, comets and asteroids have slammed into the earth with a force many times greater than the most powerful nuclear bombs. Sometimes, mass extinction followed.
Nasa craft to bring ancient asteroid sample home
A time capsule containing a sample of rock and dirt as old as the Solar System will drop from outer space into the Utah desert on 24 September 2023.
That is what Nasa has planned for its historic Osiris-Rex asteroid probe, which began its trek home on Monday.
Its precious cargo of 60g of ancient debris from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu is the largest sample collected since the Apollo Moon missions.
Scientists believe it may provide clues on the formation of the Solar System.
Nasa s Osiris-Rex started its two-and-a-half-year return journey from Bennu on Monday at 16:16 EDT (21:16 GMT).
Nasa craft carrying 4.5bn-year-old asteroid dust begins long trek home
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image captionArtwork: Osiris-Rex leaving Asteroid Bennu
A time capsule containing a sample of rock and dirt as old as the Solar System will drop from outer space into the Utah desert on 24 September 2023.
That is what Nasa has planned for its historic Osiris-Rex asteroid probe, which began its trek home on Monday.
Its precious cargo of 60g of ancient debris from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu is the largest sample collected since the Apollo Moon missions.
Scientists believe it may provide clues on the formation of the Solar System.
Nasa s Osiris-Rex started its two-and-a-half-year return journey from Bennu on Monday at 16:16 EDT (21:16 GMT).
Share April 30, 2021 NASA’s Pegasus barge, carrying the core vehicle for NASA’s first Space Launch System rocket, arrived at Kennedy Space Center on April 27.
Credit: NASA Drone Team
With the arrival of the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the ground is set for a pair of flight tests intended to reopen deep-space human exploration, 50 years after the Apollo Moon landings. “We spend a lot of time in the aerospace business designing and.
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Space community mourns the death of Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins
‘His spirit will go with us as we venture toward farther horizons.’
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NASA
Michael Collins, the witty “forgotten” astronaut of NASA’s legendary Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, died of cancer on Wednesday, his family said. An icon of space exploration and an eloquent storyteller (who, arguably, had the best sense of humor among the Apollo 11 crew), Collins passionately advocated for further exploration of other worlds. Astronauts, NASA officials, and others in the space community who are heeding his advocacy mourned his death today.
Collins was the Columbia command module pilot who stayed in orbit around the Moon in 1969 while his crew mates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, descended to the lunar surface and became the first two humans to set foot on another world. Aldrin, now the only living Apollo 11 astronaut, mourned his fellow crewmate in a tweet.