Chelyabinsk meteorite hit the Earth like a warning shot fired from space

The meteorite is providing invaluable information to help protect against larger rocks that might pose a serious threat to Earth

The meteorite fireball that fell over Chelyabinsk briefly burned 30 times brighter than the sun. Photograph: AP

Just after sunrise on 15 February 2013, as commuters made their way along snow-covered roads to Chelyabinsk in south-west Russia, the clear blue sky was torn by a hurtling lump of space rock.

The meteorite appeared without warning, out of the sun, on a shallow trajectory. It thumped into the atmosphere at 12 miles per second and became a fireball. For a moment, the rock burned 30 times brighter than the sun.

Viktor Grokhovsky, a researcher at Ural Federal University, 200km to the north of Chelyabinsk, missed the beautiful, terrifying spectacle that morning, but within minutes was watching video of the event. He spent the rest of the day assembling a search party. The first of several set out at first light the next morning to interview eyewitnesses and recover pieces of the fallen rock.

"It was rather easy to find fragments in the first days after the meteorite fell, because the chunks left holes in the snow," Grokhovsky told the Guardian. But as more snow fell over the next two weeks, the holes became covered over. The search was called off until the snow began to melt in the spring.

Nothing the size of the Chelyabinsk meteorite had fallen to Earth in 100 years, and never over an urban centre where its dramatic arrival would be captured by CCTV and dashboard video cameras installed by Russians wary of insurance scams and crooked police.

"This was the first time in modern, medieval or ancient history when a meteorite fell in an area with a high density population. This type of meteorite is rare and a lot of material fell. All these factors give excellent opportunities for extraterrestrial substance research. The hazard from asteroids and comets, people's behaviour in emergencies, and the shortage of astronomical education are all on the agenda," said Grokhovsky.

After the flash came the bang. The meteorite exploded with a force around 30 times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or 500 kilotonnes of TNT. The shockwave knocked people off their feet and shattered windows in thousands of apartments. The Earth rang to the blast, with vibrations picked up by seismic sensors 4,000km away.

Nobody was killed, but the blast injured more than 1,200 people. Many had cuts from flying glass. Others suffered retinal burns from watching the fireball, or burns that left their skin peeling. The toll was slight because the 20-metre-wide meteorite exploded so high, more than 20km above the ground.

Grokhovsky's search parties came back with more than 700 fragments of meteorite and scores of eyewitness accounts from locals. One of his expeditions had skied 50km, from village to village, beneath the meteorite's path. He used the information they gathered, along with public video footage, to piece together the trajectory of the rock and predict where much of it must have landed.

On the back of that work, a search party was sent to investigate a large hole that had appeared in ice covering a lake on the slopes of the southern Ural mountains. The team collected fragments of chondrite that matched other chunks of the meteorite. When Grokhovsky called on colleagues to measure the magnetic field at the lake, they found an anomaly in their readings near the hole. "Their analyses convinced us that exactly this meteorite had landed in the lake," Grokhovsky said.

It was October before a team of professional divers finally searched the lake, but the wait was worthwhile. "They found a 650kg meteorite fragment deep in the sludge," said Grokhovsky. The lump was so fragile it split in three when they weighed it. The heaviest chunk is now on display in the Chelyabinsk museum of local history.

"The most powerful impression for me personally was work on the night of 17 to 18 February. It was that moment when me and my colleagues from Ural Federal University's nanotech centre determined the meteorite's origin and the substance of the chunks which were collected not far from the hole in the ice," Grokhovsky said.

The recovery of so much of the meteorite will transform research in the field. Scientists can use the fragments to understand the rock's cosmic origins and its properties, all useful information to protect against a larger rock that might pose a serious threat to Earth in the future. Ominously, researchers have already discovered that there must be ten times as many potentially dangerous asteroids out there with sizes of the order of tens of metres as previously thought.

"It is very hard to overestimate the importance of the meteorite's recovery from the lake. The total mass of extraterrestrial substance that was pulled up weighed more than all the samples which were delivered to Earth by the [US] Apollo and [Soviet] Luna missions," said Grokhovsky.




Source: theguardian.com

The Hunt For Meteorites Begins In Antarctica

Antarctica is one of the best places on Earth to spot these fallen stars.

Each winter — which is summer in down south — a team of geologists camps out on an Antarctic glacier in the middle of nowhere, often where no human has ever tread. It's kind of like a space voyage, but a lot cheaper.

And it's the meteorite that's done most of the traveling.

"It's an amazing journey to think about, and a very precious rock," says Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University, from a tent about 500 miles from the South Pole. She's one of eight in an expedition group funded by NASA and based out of Case Western Reserve University.

Each day, she and her team members set out on snowmobiles, scanning the horizon for black specks — samples that will eventually make it to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Most of the meteorites have been lying on the ice since they landed on Earth millions of years ago. The glacier keeps them fairly sterile, preserving the specimens almost as a deep freezer would. And the white-and-blue expanse gives a good backdrop for the search, which is a little like looking for an ant on a white tablecloth — if the tablecloth were million-year-old, mile-thick blue ice.

"As soon as you see that dark black fusion crust on the outside, you just get so excited," Radebaugh says. "Everyone jumps up and just starts waving their hands."

Then, they drop to their knees to measure, photograph and collect the meteorite. They get excited because these rocks can offer precious information — like clues about the early solar system, and whether there was ever life on Mars.

The meteorite hunters are a hardy crew. Sleeping on a creaky slab of ice hundreds of feet thick can be a bit unnerving.

"The only thing I can hear is the popping of the glacier underneath me," Radebaugh says. "You're sitting on a giant, moving body of ice. And sometimes you forget that, until you hear the pops and groans. It's really magical."

Radebaugh and her colleagues will spend close to two months out on the ice, one group of a long line that has collected more than 20,000 meteorites in the last few decades.

This year's expedition is a little different from past years. It's a lot shorter — delayed by about a month because of the government shutdown. Bad weather has prevented the other half of the eight-person crew from landing, despite efforts to smooth a landing strip on the ice for the ski-equipped planes.

The team that is on the ground is doing its best, enjoying 24 hours of daylight and the thrill of finding chunks of other worlds.

They'll celebrate New Year's Eve under the midnight sun, listening to the popping glacier, and perhaps dreaming about popping a cork.

Source: npr.org

China successfully lands robotic rover on the moon / with video

A Chinese robotic rover landed on the moon Saturday, becoming China's first outpost on another world after a rocket-powered descent to an unexplored barren volcanic plain.

Chang'e 3 returned real-time imagery of the moon from an on-board descent
camera. Credit: CCTV

The ambitious Chang'e 3 mission also achieved the first "soft landing" on the moon in 37 years, and it made China the third country to pull off the feat after the United States and Russia.

Touchdown occurred at about 1311 GMT (8:11 a.m. EST; 9:11 p.m. Beijing time). China said the lander was aiming for a landing in the Bay of Rainbows, a dark basin on the moon's near side filled with lava that congealed billions of years ago.

The Chang'e 3 lander dropped from a low-altitude orbit, using its variable-thrust main engine to reduce its velocity from orbital speeds of 1.7 kilometers per second, or about 3,800 mph, to nearly zero.

Chinese media reports said the lander was designed to halt its descent about 300 feet above the lunar surface to ensure the landing zone was clear of hazards such as boulders or steep slopes.

Once the probe's autonomous hazard detection system was satisfied the landing site was safe, Chang'e 3 resumed its descent before shutting off its engine about 10 or 15 feet above the moon. Chinese officials said
they designed the craft's landing sets with impact suppressors similar to shock absorbers.

Laser and radar ranging sensors supplied altitude and terrain data to Chang'e 3's computer, giving the lander navigation cues during the final descent.

Such on-board smarts have never been used on an unmanned lander before.

Chinese state television broadcast the landing live, showing animation and real-time imagery from Chang'e 3's camera.

Engineers at the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center, who appeared stoic and reserved before landing, erupted in applause and flashed smiles when the touchdown was announced.

A few minutes later, officials confirmed the 12-foot-diameter lander's

solar panels deployed.

A six-wheeled mobile rover was expected to detach from the lander later this weekend, perhaps as soon as a few hours after touchdown. Officials said the lander would first vent leftover propellant.

The rover will drive several miles around the landing site, surveying the dusty charcoal-colored landscape for several months.

China named the rover Yutu after soliciting suggestions from the public. Yutu translates as "Jade Rabbit" in English.

In Chinese mythology, Yutu is a rabbit who accompanies the goddess Chang'e to the moon.

Yutu will beam 3D imagery of the moon back to Earth and measure the composition of lunar soils and rocks.

The rover is also equipped with a ground-penetrating radar to survey the structures below the moon's surface.

"As the rover drives along the lunar surface, it will be as if it can cut and see 100 meters [328 feet] below," said Ouyang Ziyuan, a researcher at the China Academy of Sciences and senior advisor to China's lunar exploration program, in an interview with Chinese state television.

Ouyang said the rover will use nuclear batteries to keep warm during lunar nights. Temperatures dip as minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 180 degrees Celsius) during nights on the moon, exposing delicate electronics to cold conditions for two weeks.

Yutu is smaller than NASA's Curiosity rover currently exploring Mars. The Chinese lunar rover stands about 4.9 feet tall and has a mass of about 140 kilograms, or 308 pounds.

The lander and Yutu rover will snap photos of each other, and the mission's stationary lander will operate for up to a year doing its own investigations. The lander's instruments include an ultraviolet telescope to observe the Earth and other scientific targets.

It could take several days to pinpoint the probe's exact location on the
moon.

An initial position estimate put the landing site at 44.12 degrees north latitude and 19.51 degrees west longitude. The estimate will be refined over the coming days.

Two European Space Agency tracking antennas were called up to receive signals from Chang'e 3 on Saturday. One of the European-owned ground stations in Australia tracked the lander throughout its descent, and another near Madrid was on standby to pick up a signal from Chang'e 3 a few hours after landing.

The New Norcia station near Perth received a strong signal from Chang'e 3 throughout its descent, according to an ESA official at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

Chang'e 3's ground team at the Beijing Aerospace Command and Control Center monitored the landing through China's own communications antennas, but ESA's ground stations were configured to provide navigation support.

Using quasars, bright beacons at the hearts of distant galaxies, ESA can attain precise position estimates for spacecraft flying through deep space. Chang'e 3 will be the first time the technique -- Delta-Differential One-Way Ranging, or delta-DOR -- has been used for a stationary probe on the surface of another celestial body.

In the delta-DOR technique, engineers compare the exact time a spacecraft's signals are received at two ground stations -- in Australia and Spain for the Chang'e 3 mission. The antennas simultaneously track a quasar, which have known locations, to correct for errors induced by radio signals passing through the Earth's atmosphere.

China's moon landing comes after the country launched two orbiters to the moon in 2007 and 2010.

One of the satellites, Chang'e 2, left the moon and became China's first interplanetary probe. Chang'e 2 flew by asteroid Toutatis in December 2012, returning the first close-up images of the potato-shaped object.

According to Ouyang, considered the father of the Chang'e lunar program, China will dispatch a robotic mission to the moon in a few years to return rock samples to Earth. The Chang'e 5 mission will launch in 2017, previous Chinese news reports said.

China has no public plans for a human mission to the moon, but scientists have said they are studying the possibility of manned expeditions in the future.

Source: spaceflightnow.com

Meteorite hunter, NASA scientists scour Tucson for fragments

TUCSON - Meteor hunters and assorted scientists are scouring Tucson looking for fragments of a meteor that crashed into the atmosphere Tuesday night.

The large meteor entered the atmosphere over Phoenix and broke up over Marana just after 7 p.m., meteorite hunter Robert Ward said.

Here's YouTube video from Phoenix of the event:

News 4 is joining Ward and other scientists in their search for the meteorite fragments today. They're searching the northwest part of town for its remnants.

Ward joins a team from NASA and the American Meteor Society in their quest.

The American Meteor Society's website has registered 34 eyewitness reports of the fireball so far. People have logged observations from Durango, Santa Fe and Las Vegas.


Source: http://www.kvoa.com

St Martin’s pupils’ close encounter with 4.3 billion year old meteorite, moon samples and rock from Mars

SCHOOL children were given the chance to hold in their hands a 4.3 billion year old fragment of a shooting star.

The truly amazing lump of rock is almost as old as the solar system and nearly a third the age of the entire universe.

The children also handled other meteorites, including one rock from the surface of Mars and samples brought back from the moon by the Apollo astronauts.

The collection came to St Martin Primary School on the Lizard last week after teacher Marcus Conrad applied for a visit on the internet.

“The pupils’ topic this term is time travel and we were looking at travelling into space,” he said.

“I found out about the collection online and applied to have the samples come to school.

“The moon samples are really small and encased in resin. The meteorites are larger and possibly more impressive.

“One of the meteorites is about the size of an orange but really heavy.

“It is quite amazing - it amazes me. I was as excited as the children were at handling these incredible samples.

“I also managed to get some footage of the Apollo landings and I set up a presentation so the children could see directly where the lunar samples came from.”

The moon rock samples, provided by the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), were collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s during some of NASA’s first manned space missions to the Moon.

A massive 382kg of lunar material was brought back to Earth, mostly for use by scientists, but small quantities are used to develop lunar and planetary sciences packs.

The Martian rock is 1.2 billion years old. It could have been blasted off into space by a meteor impact on Mars before travelling millions of miles to fall to Earth as a shooting star.

Other meteorites in the collection came from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

STFC’s chief executive officer, Professor John Womersley said: “This is a great opportunity for young people to be able to see, touch and really experience such important and exciting messengers from space - turning science fiction into science fact.

“It’s an unforgettable experience to be able to hold such an important part of science history that has made such an incredible journey to reach us. We hope it will inspire the scientists of the future.”

Source: thisiscornwall.co.uk

Scientist discovers ancient crust from Mars

Using measurements as small as a soil sample from a meteorite, Florida State University researchers led by Dr. Munir Humayun, a professor in the university’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science, has discovered and began testing what is considered the first example of ancient crust from Mars.

Dated to be about 4.5 billion years old, the rock, named NWA 7533, is believed to hold valuable information regarding Mars’ crust. This rock from a crater was found by a group of Bedouin tribesmen in the Sahara Desert.

“The Bedouin tribesmen of the Sahara desert roam the desert freely and are intimately acquainted with the rocks and minerals of their dry environment,” Humayun said. “In the past three decades they have discovered a market for meteorites with U.S. and European private collectors who pay handsomely for the haul of treasure brought to Moroccan dealers. I don’t know all the details, but the famed meteorite, nicknamed Black Beauty, was purchased from a dealer in Erfoud, Morocco. The dealer had as many as five stones all from the same fall totaling about one and a half kilograms (about three pounds) that were found scattered across the desert floor.”

With this rock now in the possession of FSU researchers, they are looking forward to gaining new insight into the crust of the Red Planet in the scientific community.

“To a geochemist, rocks are like books that are read with a laser to tell their complex stories. This meteorite is like a book with thousands of pages. It told us that the crust of Mars was assembled very early in the planet’s history. Since the crust-building volcanoes burp out water vapor and other gases that form the atmosphere, oceans and earliest life, this is very significant,” Humayun said. “It lends support to the idea of a warm, wet early Mars. We also found Martian soil lumps in the meteorite identical in composition to that measured by spacecraft and rovers at Gusev Crater on Mars. There was only one set of properties that modern Martian soils and these ancient soil lumps did not share.”

If there was an early Martian biosphere, then this rock was likely to have witnessed the microbes.

Humayun’s team includes FSU undergraduate and graduate students. He involves them in various aspects of his research spanning both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial geochemistry. He spends his time teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, mentoring Ph.D and master’s degree students, and postdoctoral fellows. His research is conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, which he says is the best place he has “ever worked in terms of infrastructure support and a wonderful staff.”

“I came to FSU ten years ago as an associate professor because of the excellent geochemical group at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. Prior to that I taught at The University of Chicago, where I received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching,” Humayun said. “I started in Geochemistry with an interest to combine my skills in chemistry, and my interests in nuclear physics with Earth and Space Science. There were excellent Geochemistry facilities and very competent faculty in that area by which I was drawn to Geochemistry.”

With students, faculty and researchers ready to study this rock, they are beginning to uncover important new information about Mars’ ancient crust.

“Importantly, Mars’ surface is covered with two very distinct types of crust: the southern highlands are heavily cratered and therefore very ancient, the northern plains are smooth and have many fewer craters,” Humayun said. “Craters are like wrinkles on people - the more they have the older they appear. A heavily cratered landscape is covered with a rock type known as a breccia–a mixture of many broken fragments of rocks from the repeated hammering by meteorites. These rocks should contain high levels of the element iridium and other elements like it from the meteorite hammers that pounded the ancient Martian surface. This is exactly what we found when analyzing this unusual meteorite. It was a breccia and it was loaded with meteoritic debris containing iridium and nickel.”

Some findings by Humayun and his group are potentially turning what some scientists and researchers thought they knew about the ancient Martian crust upside down.

“Many researchers have long thought that Mars was once intensely melted by large impacts. Our data is inconsistent with this idea termed a magma ocean,” Humayun said. “Evidence for past magma oceans have been found on the Moon, and inferred on Earth, Mars and Mercury, and likely on all major bodies in the inner solar system. Our data on this Martian meteorite, one so ancient it should bear witness to the magma ocean, implicates a cooler growth of Mars, sufficient to melt slightly but no single, large impact sufficient to melt the entire surface of the planet. The idea has strong adherents but our work may change minds.”

Another surprising finding is that using this rock from the meteorite, the rock was able to be dated and found to be a part of the crust that formed around the same time as the crust of the moon and Earth.

“The ages of the zircon minerals in this piece of Martian crust are as old as the oldest zircons recorded from the Earth and Moon,” Humayun said. “What’s surprising is how many such old zircons were found in this Martian meteorite compared with zircons from the Moon and Earth of equal antiquity which are harder to find (and we have so many more rocks from these bodies that have been searched). This implies that Mars’ crust developed very early and that the southern highlands have not been significantly changed over the eons of geological time.”

Humayun and other FSU researchers are making positive steps in discovering information on the origin and age of the ancient Martian crust, and are continuing to find out as much as they can about the Red Planet.



Source: fsunews.com

Visitor from planet Mercury at the Peabody Museum of Natural History

On the second floor of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is a strange visitor from another planet.

No bigger than a small child's fist, the greenish rock was likely blasted off the surface of the planet Mercury 24 million years ago, and after traveling through the eons, fell on the Sahara Desert in Morocco, where it was eventually found by a desert traveler and later sold to a German collector.

The discovery was announced by Prof. Tony Irving of the University of Washington's Dept. of Earth & Space Sciences. He said that the origin of the rock was determined by its magnetic qualities, which match those of Mercury.

The Peabody is where the Mercury meteorite is getting its first public showing.

"Once we determined that it was extraterrestrial, the next question was `Where was it from?' " he said. "Of all the places where it may have come from -- Mars, the Moon, the asteroid belt -- it most closely resembles what we know about Mercury."

It's the first object believed to have come from Mercury. Meteors have been found that came from Mars and the Moon, but this is the first that likely came from the innermost planet.

The thought isn't that far-fetched, Irving said. For starters, Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with a little more than one-third the gravity of Earth. It also bears the scars of countless impact events, many sufficiently large to launch projectiles out to Earth's orbit and beyond. It also has almost no atmosphere.

Irving said that it has a number of qualities that point to a Mercurian origin: It has "native" or non-oxidized iron in small amounts. That, in and of itself, points to an extraterrestrial origin, Irving said.

But most significantly, it has the same magnetic qualities as what has been seen on Mercury. The ongoing NASA Messenger mission has measured the magnetic field of Mercury in detail, and the magnetic signatures of the object and Mercury seem to match.

The greenish rock has, in fact, the lowest magnetic intensity ever measured in any meteorite -- a magnetism that matches Mercury's modern field almost exactly, Irving says.

"This object does not have a counterpart with any rock that we know about," saidIrving, who has studied the rock with his colleagues since the spring of 2012.

The green coating is caused by the presence of chromium, combined with the heat of entering the Earth's atmosphere. The orange flecks were caused by terrestrial contamination, Irving said.

The meteor was one of about 35 space rocks found in the same locale, and all believed to be from a much larger meteor that crashed into what is now Morocco several thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for the researchers, all but one were tested with powerful magnets by the desert wanderers who found them. They do this to determine in the field if the rocks they find are indeed meteorites. This is not an issue for most space rocks, but for those that come from other planets, it makes exacting magnetic research impossible.

"To some people, not having an absolute answer is annoying," Irving said, "But, you're just going to have to live with that. The problem, of course, is that meteorites don't come with an address."

Irving said that it's not out of the question that the object is from somewhere else.

"But, if it is, that somewhere else is a really interesting place," he said.




Source: newstimes.com

Mars Meteorite Reveals 1st Look at Ancient Martian Crust

A meteorite found last year in the Sahara Desert is likely the first recognized piece of ancient Martian crust, a new study reports.

The Mars meteorite NWA 7533 is 4.4 billion years old and contains evidence of long-ago asteroid strikes, suggesting that the rock came from the Red Planet's ancient and cratered southern highlands, researchers said.

"We finally have a sample of the Martian highlands, that portion of Mars that holds all the secrets to Mars' birth and early development," lead author Munir Humayun of Florida State University told SPACE.com via email.

"It's the part of Mars' history where the oceans and atmosphere developed, and where life would have developed if it ever did on Mars," Humayun added. "I will liken this to opening a treasure chest — it may take a while before we find the best treasures, but treasures aplenty lurk in this meteorite."

Humayun and his colleagues subjected NWA (short for northwest Africa, where the rock was found) 7533 to a series of analyses. The researchers determined the meteorite's age, for example, by determining that crystals within it called zircons formed about 4.4 billion years ago.

"This date is about 100 million years after the first dust condensed in the solar system," Humayun said in a statement. "We now know that Mars had a crust within the first 100 million years of the start of planet-building, and that Mars' crust formed concurrently with the oldest crusts on Earth and the moon."

The team also found high concentrations of normally rare elements such as nickel, osmium and iridium in NWA 7533, indicating that the rock formed in a region that was pummeled by chondritic meteors, which are relatively enriched in these materials.

Further, after measuring the abundances of certain elements within the meteorite, Humayun and his team were able to calculate a thickness for the Red Planet's crust.

"The amount of melting on Mars was low, sufficient to accumulate a 50-kilometer-thickness [31 miles] crust, but Mars evidently escaped the giant impact-style melting that affected the Earth and moon," Humayun told SPACE.com. (Most scientists think the moon formed from material blasted into space when a planet-size body crashed into Earth more than 4 billion years ago.)

"This is the first reliable geochemical estimate of the thickness of Mars' crust, and it agrees with geophysical estimates from gravity and topography," he added.

Though researchers believe ancient Mars was relatively warm and wet, the team found no hydrous silicate minerals — which form in the presence of liquid water — within NWA 7533. Scientists will likely unearth more such puzzling details as they study the meteorite further, Humayun said.

"I expect more surprises as we dig deeper into our Martian treasure chest — some we will understand, and others may continue to befuddle us for a while to come," he said.


Source: space.com

Scientists Debate, Prepare for Killer Asteroid

Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Volcanoes. Now, add asteroids to the list of natural disasters that can threaten humanity and all life on our planet.

For decades, Hollywood films like Deep Impact andArmageddon have let moviegoers enjoy the terror of fictional earthbound asteroids from the safety of their seats.

But on February 15th of this year, residents of Chelyabinsk in central Russia discovered that the threat is as real as it gets.

That meteorite wounded more than 1,000 people - a pinprick compared to the one that probably wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and far more benign than the meteor that exploded over Siberia in1908, leveling more than 2,000 square kilometers of forest.

Or the meteorite that hit present day Arizona, 50,000 years ago, and made a crater large enough to swallow up the entire city of San Francisco.

But those strikes were no flukes.

There are an estimated 10,000 known asteroids orbiting our region of the inner solar system. That’s just one percent of the million or more asteroids scientists believe to be our near neighbors in the inner Solar System.

Recently, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson warned about....

" ...asteroids crashing to earth as meteorites or exploding in the atmosphere. That would be bad," he said.

He invited a group of concerned astronaut-scientists from the Association of Space Explorers, which included Thomas Jones.

“So one of these big explosions is capable of causing a global shutdown in agriculture and starving billions of people to death, as well as those who are killed by the actual explosion itself. Now small asteroids might level a city, but we could still lose hundreds of thousands of people," said Jones.

Asteroids are chunks of dark mineral rich rock that reflect almost no sunlight, so they are hard to spot from Earth. But infrared sensors on a space-based telescope could detect the heat they have absorbed from the sun.

That will be the job of the Sentinel Deep Space Telescope, bristling with infrared sensors, along with mapping and communications gear. The Sentinel mission is the brainchild of former astronaut Edward Lu and his B612 Foundation, which is committed to reducing the asteroid threat. Sentinel is scheduled to launch in 2018.

“Our telescope is sensitive enough that you actually can see a charcoal briquette against a black sky from ten times the distance from New York to Los Angeles," said Lu.

Once the asteroids are spotted and their orbits determined, an earthbound asteroid can be nudged slightly off course with a satellite deflector or a high velocity projectile, or blown up with nuclear weapons, causing it to miss its deadly rendezvous.

Much like Hollywood imagined it would in the 1957 science fiction film The Day the Sky Exploded.

But this time it’s the real world that would be saved.


Source: (Voice of America) voanews.com

Meteorite fall creates panic in Garo Hills

Biplab Kr Dey
TURA, Nov 14 – A meteorite falling in the areas bordering Bangladesh created panic among the residents of the Garo Hills region. The meteorite, which fell inside Bangladesh, lit up the night sky around 10.30 pm last night. It was eagerly watched by the residents living along these areas.

The meteorite fell close to the Dumnikura BoP in the Sherpur district of Bangladesh, just beside the international border and the impact was heard even 40 km away from the area where it fell. Dumnikura is a border outpost in the South Garo Hills, very close to where five police personnel were killed last week.

A resident of the neighbouring Dalu village in West Garo Hills, Dipu Marak, was witness to the incident.

He said, “We heard a loud noise around 10.30 pm last night and immediately rushed outside. We were in a state of shock. The meteorite lit up the night sky and narrowly missed us.”

Other local residents said the whole area shook under the impact of the fall and the light could be seen even on the Indian side of the border.

Panic-stricken people, who ran out of their houses, said that the sound resembled that of an aeroplane’s at a

close range.

Source: assamtribune.com

Why Is This Rock Worth $400,000?

Meteorite hunters risk prison and even death to find money from the sky, in the form of rare space rocks that are older than the Earth itself.

For 13 days in 2011 Michael Farmer and Robert Ward combed the southern desert of Oman, seeking treasure in the sands of Dhofar.

The pair were not on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula to hunt for gold, gems, or fossils. They were there for meteorites. Oman's untouched landscape, monotone taupe background, and arid climate make for ideal hunting conditions. The trip was proving to be particularly successful—Farmer claimed a find that had once rested on the moon. He knew a collector who would want it, so he called from the field to arrange a $45,000 sale. For his part, Ward found a watermelon-size specimen, weighing nearly 100 pounds, that could easily be worth $60,000.

Then, on the 14th day of the trip, the two Americans were stopped at a roadblock on a mountain pass near Adam. Omani soldiers armed with M16s pulled them from their vehicles and started rifling through their belongings. "When they found that big rock of Robert's, they really went nuts," Farmer says. "The next thing I knew we were handcuffed together and thrown in the back of a truck."

Ward and Farmer were taken in shackles to a military base, locked in solitary confinement, and interrogated around the clock. Weeks later the bewildered Americans were given a 15-minute trial, which took place entirely in Arabic, and convicted of illegal mining.

Oman has no clear law against meteorite hunting. For centuries it had overlooked the rocks. Now that those stones have great value on the world market, the authorities in Muscat have become fiercely protective. The International Meteorite Collectors Association has been trying to find out the nation's legal guidelines, to no avail.

Convicted of illegal mining, Farmer and Ward were sentenced to serve time with criminals from India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Egypt. The Americans could hear riots in other parts of the prison. Their ordeal would stretch on for 54 days, until a retrial freed them. (Their attorney successfully argued that plucking rocks from aboveground could not be considered mining.) The meteorites were confiscated, and the two Americans are now banned from entering Oman.

For weeks after returning from the Middle East, Ward had had a hard time forcing himself to leave his Prescott, Ariz., home and when he did drive somewhere, to step out of his car. Although he can't imagine having the courage to jump from an airplane, chasing meteorites in the world's wilds makes perfect sense to him. Would he pay for this passion with his life? "I'm sure I will," he says. "But the question is are you going to die sitting on the sofa or doing something interesting?"


Space For Sale


The specimens meteorite hunters collect—and occasionally risk their lives to obtain—are an increasingly treasured commodity. "Like money from the sky," famed U.S. meteorite hunter Robert Haag once said.

In this field, cosmic geology meets market economics. A common stony meteorite, called a chondrite, can sell for $25 or less, but a slice of iron–nickel pallasite laced with olivine crystals can easily fetch a thousand times that. The stories behind them also matter. A meteorite collected after a witness sees its fall brings gobs of money. Meteorites that strike objects—cars, tin roofs, mailboxes—push the prices higher.

Most meteorites originate between Mars and Jupiter, where a belt of asteroids has lingered for 4.5 billion years, since the solar system was young. No rock on Earth is as old as a meteorite—all terrestrial material has been ground, melted, and reformed by plate tectonics. Meteorites have other, less common, origins. Meteor impacts on the moon or Mars can eject surface material into space that ends up on Earth. Last year a 10.5-ounce meteorite that originated on Mars fetched $94,000. A 4-pound lunar meteorite, the most expensive ever auctioned, sold for $330,000 in 2012.

"As the public becomes aware that they can own these things, we are seeing more and more interest," says Jim Walker, director of fine minerals for New York City–based Heritage Auctions. "It's the romance of having something not of the Earth, first. Second, the oldest thing that you can lay your hands on is a meteorite."

Meteors (a meteor is not called a meteorite until it hits Earth) carry with them the secrets of the universe, clues not only to the dawn of our solar system, but, many believe, to the origins of life on this planet. Scientists theorize that meteors seeded Earth with organic molecules, enabling life to form.

And so, meteorites are coveted by museums, scientists, and private collectors. Auction houses entered the game in the mid-1990s, catering to clients such as Steven Spielberg, Nicolas Cage, and Yo-Yo Ma. Such celebrity involvement has driven up prices. Now the Internet has opened the field to even more people—some interested in science, others only in the investment.

"There are many meteorite hunters and collectors who actively collaborate, to help to characterize newly found meteorites," says Mike Zolensky, a NASA astromaterials curator. "There are also some problems. Many collectors will get a sample and tuck it away. Many meteorites are not known to science for that reason."

Full-time hunters, including Farmer and Ward, often donate a portion of their discoveries to university labs in return for help with authentication. Carl Agee, director of the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, says hunters play a central role for science, even if they have ulterior motives. "You have to put a lot of effort into searching for meteorites," he says. "When the hunters find them and ask us to help classify them, it benefits everybody."

Agee notes that researchers interested in microscopic analysis don't have to bid against high-dollar collectors, the way museums do. "We have plenty of meteorites that are small, perfect for research," he says. "In the past few decades display pieces have become much more popular. The more demand there is, prices will naturally increase."

Randy Korotev, who studies lunar meteorites at Washington University in St. Louis, says the rise in interest—and value—is not welcomed by everyone. "I have colleagues, particularly those associated with museums, who are irate about this," Korotev says. "I cannot buy meteorites from Oman or northwest Africa with my NASA grant money because the U.S. government would consider them stolen property. Museum people think it's like stealing artifacts out of Egypt."

Farmer donates some finds but is also a professional and is certainly in it for profit. And, as his peers readily admit, he's one of the best. A meteorite paid for his house in Tucson, Ariz. Another put solar panels on the roof. And a third earned him a trip to Bora Bora with his wife.

Like many others in the business, Farmer is both a meteorite hunter and a dealer. His most famous discovery—a 117-pound pallasite unearthed on a farm in Canada—was purchased by the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto for $600,000. Like every hunter, though, Farmer has had his share of disappointments. On the patio behind the kitchen sits a brick-size stone he purchased for $10,000. It's what people in this field call a meteorwrong—a worthless piece of terrestrial rock. "I keep it around," he says, "as a reminder. You're not always right."

Inside his home, meteorites recovered on a recent trip to Chelyabinsk, Russia, lay scattered across the glass top of the dining room table. Tiny ones—no larger than a grain of sea salt—dot paper towels. Others rest in glass vials. Walnut-size nuggets fill white cardboard cartons and wooden cigar boxes. Those waiting to be sorted sit in two glass Pyrex dishes. "A few months ago this sucker was out past Mars and now it's here," he says, holding up one of his finds. "Makes you feel insignificant."

Despite his candid demeanor, the nature of his work can be shadowy. He balks at describing how he transported all those rocks home from Chelyabinsk. "I use methods I'd prefer not to discuss," he says with a smile. "My Russian friends might behead me."




Source: popularmechanics

Scientists predict Chelyabinsk like meteorite event ahead

Scientists have predicted Chelyabinsk like meteorite explosion events in the future also, which may have much more hazardous effects on the Earth.

At a recent panel of the Association of Space Explorers in New York, physicist and former astronaut Ed Lu warned that there are about 10,000 known asteroids orbiting our region of the solar system.

Lu’s B612 Foundation is planning to help launch a space-based infrared telescope in 2018 that can detect the heat emitted by asteroids, map their position and orbit, then provide a warning in time to mount an international effort to deflect the more dangerous ones.

According to recent scientific studies published in the journals Nature and Science, the possibility of these dangerous asteroids entering Earth’s atmosphere may be greater than previously believed.

Physicist Paul Wiegert of the University of Western Ontario and an author of a study of the Chelyabinsk meteor said, “Chelyabinsk didn’t really create as much damage as we might have expected, and that’s a good thing. The flip side is that we are now starting to discover that events like the Chelyabinsk event are occurring more frequently than we had originally anticipated. But we’ll have to wait a little while longer and collect a little more information before we can know for sure.”

The scientists at the University of California described the 20-metre Chelyabinsk meteoroid strike that injured around 1200 people as “a wake-up call”.

Chelyabinsk was the largest meteoroid strike since the Tunguska event of 1908, and modern technology provides an unprecedented opportunity to study such an event, researchers said. The Chelyabinsk meteorite belongs to the most common type of meteorite, an “ordinary chondrite.”

Meanwhile, the officials at NASA’s Near Earth Object program, which scans the heavens for dangerous objects, say the space agency is reassessing what size rocks to look for and how often they are likely to hit.




Source: Pentagonpost.com

Meteorites rained life into Earth, says study

Sankar Chatterjee, a Texas Tech University palaeontologist,

 suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the “bowels of hell”.

Meteorite bombardment left large craters on Earth that contained water and chemical building blocks for life, which ultimately led to the first organisms 4 billion years ago, an Indian-origin scientist suggests.

How life began on Earth has baffled humans for millennia.

Now, research from a Texas Tech University palaeontologist suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the “bowels of hell”.

Researcher Sankar Chatterjee believes he has found the answer by connecting theories on chemical evolution with evidence related to our planet’s early geology.

“This is bigger than finding any dinosaur. This is what we’ve all searched for — the Holy Grail of science,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth’s surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms.

Dr. Chatterjee’s research suggests meteorites can be givers of life as well as takers. He said that meteor and comet strikes likely brought the ingredients and created the right conditions for life on our planet.

By studying three sites containing the world’s oldest fossils, he believes he knows how the first single-celled organisms formed in hydrothermal crater basins.

“When the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile planet inhospitable to living organisms,” Dr. Chatterjee said.

“It was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. 1 billion years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life — the ancestors to all living things,” he said.

Dr. Chatterjee presented his findings during the 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

Source: thehindu.com

Asteroid Defense Plan Overdue, Astronauts Say; UN Now Preparing For Impact

Fears about an "Armageddon"-like space rock collision have prompted the United Nations to create an International Asteroid Warning Group and a plan for deflecting an incoming asteroid.


Respected scientist-astronauts have been saying it for years: We need to prepare. But before the UN General Assembly approved new measures this month, no country had even been on the lookout for asteroids that might be on course to hit earth, Scientific American reports. As one Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, put it: "If we don't find it until a year out, make yourself a nice cocktail and go out and watch."

Planetary protection apparently isn't just a job for Bruce Willis. The threat is real. And, actually, "deep impact" has happened before.

In 1908, a meteorite exploded over a place called Tunguska in a remote part of Siberia. For decades no one was quite sure what flattened trees for miles around but caused no crater. Scientists later discovered the rock fell so fast (around 33,500 mph) and got so hot (44,500 degrees Fahrenheit) that it simply exploded several miles above the earth with the force of hundreds of atomic bombs.

Then in 1994, the same kind of thing happened again, only this time to our distant neighbor, Jupiter. A comet called Shoemaker-Levy 9 splashed into the planet's gaseous surface, leaving bright scars visible from earth.

And just this February, Russia got splattered again with space debris when meteorite bits rained down on Chelyabinsk, injuring more than 1,000. Divers found a 1,300-pound fragment at the bottom of a lake.

"We are literally living in a cosmic shooting gallery," the group B612 says on its website. It adds: "The probability of a 100 Megaton impact somewhere on earth each and every year is the same as the probability of an individual being killed in an automobile accident each year — about .01 percent."

B612 has been urging space agencies and the UN to develop some kind of plan to both observe an impending collision and divert it far enough in advance that we don't have to worry. A rock of just average size could wipe out a city.

On Friday, scientists from the Association of Space Explorers gave a talk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "There are 100 times more asteroids out there than we have found. There are about 1 million asteroids large enough to destroy New York City or larger. Our challenge is to find these asteroids first before they find us," NASA astronaut Ed Lu, CEO of B612, told Scientific American.

Once we find one, there are a few options for what to do about it. The UN seems to be running on the general plan to fly something big into the asteroid years before it would reach us. A slight change in tragectory would send it off the collision course.

Another option: asteroid cannon. The Japanese space agency, JAXA, is doing reseach on asteroid composition and launching a space gun to fire a big metal bullet into a nearby asteroid.

Source: isciencetimes.com

Artist Nicolas Baier explores the ‘poetic potential’ of the cosmos

It’s an ethos that’s been fully embraced by Nicolas Baier over the past couple of decades. Now 46, the Montreal-born, Concordia University-trained multidisciplinary artist has become famous for finding what he likes to call “the poetic potential” in realms and materials not usually associated with the fine arts tradition. Like meteorites. In recent years he’s been methodically grinding down meteorites he’s bought or been given into very fine graphite particles, mixing them in an acrylic medium, then applying the black particles like paint to oval-shaped canvases. He puts the results into shiny aluminum frames, then snugly installs each canvas in a custom-made box that includes a photograph of the precrushed meteorite and a sheet with information on the age of the meteorite and where it was found.

Several of these paintings – called, aptly enough, Météorite 1, Météorite 2 (and so on) – are on display and for sale at the Galerie Division/Division Gallery booth Friday through Monday at the 14th Toronto International Art Fair.

For the full experience of the Baier oeuvre and his current enthusiasms, though, it’s best to go to Galerie Division’s sprawling Toronto outpost in funky Bloordale that is hosting a survey of recent work titled Transmission. It’s a decidedly cosmic show “about reaching what’s important, what’s at the base of everything,” Baier said the other day as he oversaw the exhibition’s installation. Which is one way of saying that if you’re interested in, say, precise acrylic paintings of the Higgs boson (“which just may be the most important particle in the universe”) or a black metal sculptural representation of a computer server “containing all the books of human history in all languages” or mirrors incised with triangles and polygons illustrating astrophysicist Jean-Pierre Luminet’s theories about the dodacahedral shape of the cosmos, well, Division is the place to space. Laughed Baier: “It’s just my own very, very little participation in a science project.”

Transmission revels in the interplay of macro and micro. Neurones, a large (152 cm by 203) ink-jet print on matte paper, for instance, appears on first inspection to be something concocted by an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s – that or bullet holes fired into a plaster wall. But it is in fact as advertised: two months’ worth of photographs of human neurons, painstakingly shot through a microscope, at exposures of between one and 1.5 seconds, then digitally assembled.

Thing is, for all its intimidating aroma of science and technology, Transmission is frequently ravishing to the eye. Indeed, it’s Baier’s hope that “you can enter this show with having any explanation from me and still enjoy it. I mean, when was the last time you looked at a DVD and put on the option of running the director’s commentary the first time you watched the movie? You never do that. But in museums they do it all the time! You have the piece and the written words on the walls and the voice-guides that explain everything to you. That drives me nuts!”

Certainly, no “explanation” is needed for the pleasure and the menace the viewer will experience upon encountering Vanité/Vanitas, a major hit last year as part of the Oh, Canada exhibition in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Baier readily acknowledges that “as hard as I’ve worked on the other pieces here, it’s gonna steal the show. People supposedly stare at an art work, on average, for eight or nine seconds. This one? They’ll stand for 15 minutes. It’s crazy!’” Monumental in size (a cube – or cell? – roughly three metres by two metres by three) and construction cost ($250,000), it contains within its fluorescent-lit glass-and-mirror frame, an artist’s working environment in which everything – including a half-eaten breakfast, crumpled pieces of paper, a tangle of electrical cords – has been completely plated in aluminum, nickel and steel. Yet for all its many surfaces, shiny and transparent, it permits no human reflection. “Everything is dead, sterile,” Baier observes. “We are in the zoo of the human,” the installation a riff on the Baudrillardian notion that “the objects we create are the mirrors of ourselves.”

Asked if he feels his work is a sort of corrective to art’s relative neglect of advances in science and applied technology in its content, Baier side-stepped the question. “To tell you truth, I don’t want to enter into a kind of political way to see contemporary art and judge my peers and colleagues. It is as it is. I’m just trying to do my little thing. Maybe art has thought a little too much about itself. Maybe it needs to open a little bit more its eyes and ears and its head. Maybe. It’s not my field of discussion,” he shrugged. “For me, it’s time to lose. I prefer to work.”

At the same time, Baier is quick to deny that there’s something anti-human or utterly rarefied about his interests and his practice. Sure, he likes big ideas, philosophy, mathematics, thinking about the Big Bang Theory – but “the cosmos is everywhere,” he insisted. “It’s not a thousand miles from us. It’s inside you; it’s inside me; it’s this room. … The observations about the Higgs boson permit us to think that primary particles are almost all the same material. It’s just the different combinations, the juxtaposition, of these same materials, that makes this table metal, your flesh flesh, wood wood. So when I’m thinking of the cosmos it’s not a way for me to be far away from the human. It’s a way to be in touch with the most important things in human life.”



Nicolas Baier: Transmission is at Division Gallery, 45 Ernest Ave., Toronto through Dec. 21. Information: galeriedivision.com. Works by Baier are also on view at the Galerie Division booth at Art Toronto Oct. 25 through 28 (Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Front St. W.).

Source: theglobeandmail.com

Astronomers Discover the Most Distant Galaxy Yet

Its light blasted into space when the universe was only 700 million years old

Astronomers have found a galaxy far, far away - 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, to be exact.

Astronomers have found a galaxy 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making it officially the most distant object ever detected.

A faint, infrared speck of light from this ancient galaxy, called z8_GND_5296, was spotted using the Hubble Space Telescope and one of the world's largest ground-based telescopes, a ten-meter telescope at Keck Observatory at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Light from this baby galaxy began its journey when the universe was about 700 million years old and just emerging from the cosmic mist left over from its birth, said Casey Papovich, one of the lead authors of the study and an astronomer at Texas A&M University in College Station.

The former record holder is a fellow youngster, an ultra-faint galaxy about 100 million light-years closer to Earth.

Past claims of galaxies at these extreme distances were mined from deep field images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But many of these would-be candidates turned out to be much closer than previously thought, according to Papovich.

"Some of our candidates have turned out to be very cold stars—brown dwarfs—in our own galaxy," he explained.

Redshift Reveals

The only way to confirm a galaxy's true distance, however, is to do follow-up measurements analyzing the spectrum of light emitted. This can enable astronomers to determine a candidate's redshift—how far its light is shifted into the red part of the spectrum—and thereby its distance.

Redshift occurs because wavelengths of light stretch out as galaxies move away from observers on Earth. So the higher the redshift number, the more distant the object from Earth.

Papovich's team found this faint galaxy's redshift was 7.5, compared with the previous record holder's 7.2.

"Until you have a redshift, there is always some doubt about the exact nature of the galaxy," said Papovich.

"All the other objects out there with claimed 'most distant galaxy' in their titles are candidates selected using only imaging, and no spectroscopic confirmation like what we have done here."

The find, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature, is expected to help researchers better understand the so-called era of reionization, when newborn hot, massive stars and their galaxies transformed the opaque hydrogen fog—which filled the cosmos in the first billion years after the Big Bang—into the transparent intergalactic space we see today.

"The galaxies themselves [in this era of the universe] would be filled with the newly formed, massive stars, many of which could be a thousand times the mass of our own sun," Papovich explained.

"We have yet to identify any conclusive evidence that these 'first-generation' stars exist in even this distant galaxy."

How Far Back Can We Go?

Can we push the record back even further, closer to the Big Bang?

Richard Ellis, an astronomer not connected to the study, says it is definitely possible. But we do not yet have telescopes powerful enough to do the job.

"We have the capability, in principle, to push to redshifts of ten and beyond, corresponding to a time when the universe was only 350 million years old, or only 3 percent of its present age," said Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

The conundrum for researchers is that looking at larger distances means looking further back in time. That means galaxies become ever fainter as we push closer to the birth of the universe and the Big Bang.

"For most of the early galaxies being seen by Hubble, there's little hope of confirming their distances with spectroscopy until we get powerful new facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope," said Ellis.

"Ultimately, to chart the universe in detail at these early times, we need the next-generation facilities."



Source: National Geographic

Chebarkul X-Files: searching for extra-terrestrial life

The space wanderer wasn’t found at the bottom of Lake Chebarkul. In spite of numerous attempts, divers failed to find a 500-kilogram piece of the meteorite which was believed to have fallen there after the celestial body had exploded over Chelyabinsk.

Many residents of Chelyabinsk and its suburbs, if not each one of them, are going to remember the morning February 15, 2013, for many years. A bright flash and an explosion made the Chelyabinsk Krai population freeze. A heat wave of unbelievable force that followed shattered window frames rather than windows themselves right inside the buildings, damaged balconies and rooftops. The immediate outage of mobile and Internet connection got people thinking about the worst – the beginning of a nuclear war. The only thing seemed strange – a typical mushroom cloud wasn’t seen anywhere.

Today, almost ten months after the meteorite explosion, few things remind of a catastrophe in Chelyabinsk. Amid severe Ural winter, people and authorities repaired homes and other damaged buildings over the shortest period of time. Due to a lack of glass in both the city and the region it was brought from other regions.

However, the meteorite fall on the territory of the small town of Chebarkul may be even considered some kind of luck. Chebarkul is almost 300 years but came to prominence only over the last two decades. The residents of the town don’t hurry to refresh their memories of February 15 going to a local museum as only a flash, panic and rumors come to mind recalling that day. And an ice-hole which became a site of pilgrimage. In the summer, authorities arranged excursions to the lake where a red memorable buoy bearing an inscription “Meteorite fell here on February 15, 2013” was installed.

Only few people, especially young ones, are still under impression. Eight-grader Maksim says:

“We had a physical education class when all of a sudden we saw a bright flash in the sky. Then an explosion followed. Everyone thought a plane or a rocket had crashed but a teacher explained to us that a meteorite fell. We were really scared. And later, during an IT class we started reading about meteorites on the Internet.”

The operation on raising the meteorite is being carried out at a distance from the town, on the opposite side of the lake. The entire operation was supposed to take up 28 days and to finish on October 4. Divers promised to raise everything they would find at the bottom of the lake. Few expected that a layer of slit had reached more than six meters and that the weather would be changing every half an hour. In spite of secrecy surrounding the operation, everyone in Chebarkul knows where divers live and work. A small wooden house, several iron storehouses and simple tents - that’s how modest water explorers live. All the necessary equipment is already on the lake.
Even though divers were lucky at the beginning of the operation raising small fragments of the rock from time to time, at some point the luck seemed to turn its back on them. First, weather began worsening which led to an abrupt water temperature drop. Besides, divers were forced to take off special gloves because of the slit and continue working like this, warming up their hands with sediment from the bottom of the lake.

Nevertheless, experts literally got their teeth into the slit. They didn’t lose hope until the very end as a sonar constantly detected large pieces of some hard foreign bodies. At some point they decided to expand the search area but the result left much to be desired as a big 20-kilo stone couldn’t pass for an extraterrestrial body.

However, this piece and 12 others were sent to Chelyabinsk Research University. Only four of them were identified as parts of the fallen meteorite. Thanks to the research, experts managed to establish the age of the “space visitor” which is about 4.5 billion years.

Source: http://voiceofrussia.com

Another mystery of Chelyabinsk meteorite unveiled

Many witnesses of the meteorite explosion over Chelyabinsk in February of this year said that they were able to see most interesting things. However, they are mistaken, because there are many things they could not see from the Earth surface. Thankfully, weather satellite Suomi was able to take pictures of all the interesting events that followed immediately after the explosion and provide pictures to scientists.

A renowned expert on small bodies of the Solar System Professor Valentina Prokofieva-Michailovskaya presented at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory under the framework of COSPAR program the work of her former student, now a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, the leading data analyst for "Suomi " meteorological satellite Nicholai Gor'kavyi "Small asteroid caused a huge dust ring around the Earth." The interesting satellite observations related to the results of the cosmic collision complete the knowledge of the developments in the Earth's atmosphere after the explosion of the meteorite on February 15, 2013.

A joint project of NASA and NOAA, weather satellite Suomi, was launched on October 28th, 2011. This man-made Earth satellite named after an American meteorologist Verner Suomi is the newest laboratory for the study of terrestrial and aquatic spaces, the atmosphere and clouds, snow and ice of the planet and its vegetation. Telescopes, video and photo cameras, and a variety of sensors are the eyes of the equipment looking down to the Earth. One of the sensors is a limb sensor that looks at the horizon with a thin blue strip of air over it.

During an orbital flight from the South Pole to the north, the limb sensor will measure the atmospheric glow 180 times a day. Three slots aimed at different parts of the horizon will obtain and record the spectra of about 500 atmospheric profiles.

Suomi orbits the Earth 14 times in 24 hours, providing 7,000 atmospheric profiles that can help build a three-dimensional picture of the dust level in the atmosphere. This unusual and unscheduled work had to be conducted later based on the data obtained by Suomi when the exploding fireball brighter than the sun illuminated the end of its trajectory over Chelyabinsk, giving a challenging task to the unsuspecting meteorologists.

The brightest flash of the explosion was followed by a "rain" of rocks, a large meteorite fragments, and dust. Fine dust stayed in the air and spread with the wind. Watching this from the ground proved difficult, as the hot air blast has rapidly gone up in a convective cloud, its velocity was 130 m / s, and some of the dust has been thrown to a height of 10 km.

As mentioned earlier, the numerous and complex equipment of "Suomi" captures various parameters. The data is processed by experts from different companies. The limb sensor under contract with NASA is led by SSAI. Experts process the data, and the processing is very difficult because of the need for a precise calibration of the devices, digitizing of the data and then building a model of the spatial features in the observations.

The first attempt to catch the event was made on February 18th, but was unsuccessful. Three sets of orbital data over Chelyabinsk on February 14, 15 and 16 of 2013 were studied, but the aerosol profiles were indistinguishable from one another, and a signal of "dust" from the meteor was not detected. It is well known that such dust stays in the air for a long time, so the assumption about the weakness of the dust cloud was rejected, and the scientists continued to search for its traces.

On February 19 the second attempt was made with a different approach, and it was clearly effective. All orbits for February 15-18 were taken from "Suomi". A bright aerosol spot with a maximum density at altitudes of 35 km was discovered at the latitude of Chelyabinsk. The main contribution was from the orbit on February 16. The aerosol was recorded over Siberia, many miles east of the explosion.

Data search on February 15 aimed at assessing the side slits of the limb sensor, and was successful. It turned out that the left slot of the sensor caught a dust cloud at an altitude of 30 km above Chelyabinsk five hours after the fall of the meteorite. The right slot on the previous orbit just in 3.5 hours 1,000 km east of Chelyabinsk found a dust cloud. But this signal was weaker, and indicated the altitude of about 40 km. That prompted a hypothesis about the east movement of the cloud over Siberia by strong winds.

Scientists Paul Newman and Arlindo da Silva, experts in atmospheric dynamics, built a computer model taking into account the movement of the wind in the stratosphere over Chelyabinsk. West wind at altitudes of 20 to 50 km was dominant, reaching 85 m / s. The highest part of the convective dust cloud swiftly moved to the east and reached Novosibirsk 3.5 hours later. The lower layers were moving slowly. In the model calculations on February 16 the dust stretched over Siberia, which was consistent with Suomi data. On February 18 the dust has reached North America and appeared in the skies over the Atlantic.

Four days later the dust was seen over Europe and gradually reached Chelyabinsk. For the next three months the dust ring stayed around the Earth at the altitude of 30-40 км. The article in Geophysical Research Letters on June 26 2013 for the first time presented the obtained data. A co-author of the work was A. Dadurov, a professor at Chelyabinsk University who first collected the meteorite dust on the snow around Chelyabinsk and who continued studying the dust component.

Later, on August 14, 2013 NASA published a press release with the study results.

The results obtained by Suomi are interesting because the fall of such a relatively small asteroid has produced large-scale consequences. The discovered dust plume served as a convincing evidence of the effect of small space bodies on the Earth. The reality of the asteroid danger was confirmed by the incident with Chelyabinsk meteorite that was heavily studied by scientists.

Tatyana Valchuk

Source: Pravda.Ru

Massive Star Explosion Seeded the Early Solar System, Meteorite Study Suggests

The explosive death of a star seeded matter into the solar system soon after its birth, analysis of a meteorite now reveals.

Earth and the rest of the solar system coalesced from a giant cloud of gas and dust more than 4.5 billion years ago. Many of the details about the galactic neighborhood in which the solar system arose still remain a mystery.

Meteorites contain some of the oldest material in the solar system, dating back to its formation. As such, researchers often analyze these objects in order to discover what materials were present when the sun, Earth and other planets were born. This study sheds light on where these solar system bodies might have come from.

All elements heavier than nickel are ultimately created by supernovas, giant explosions resulting from the deaths of stars. These explosions are bright enough to momentarily outshine their entire galaxies. Now, scientists analyzing meteorites have found that a supernova may have injected matter into the solar system within a small window of time after the solar system's first solids formed.

"This is evidence for supernova addition at the very start of our solar system, over 4.5 billion years ago," said the meteorite study's lead author,Gregory Brennecka, a cosmochemist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Brennecka and his colleagues investigated the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth as a fireball in Mexico in 1969. Theyfocused on lumps within this meteorite known as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions. These particles are some of the oldest objects in the solar system — they were the first solids to form in the protoplanetary disk that eventually gave rise to Earth and the other planets.

The scientists focused on a wide range of isotopes within the inclusions. In general, elements come in a variety of isotopes that differ in how many neutrons they possess in their atomic nuclei; carbon-12 has six neutrons, while carbon-13 has seven. (Both have six protons.)

Brennecka and his colleagues discovered these inclusions all had similar concentrations of isotopes. However, the concentrations were distinct from the average composition of the materials that make up the bulk of meteorites and the Earth.

The researchers propose the inclusions formed close to the young sun, possibly within a span as short as 20,000 to 50,000 years. As such, matter from a nearby supernova did not pollute these inclusions, as it did the outer regions of the protoplanetary disk. The inclusions later mixed with the material that went on to make the Allende meteorite and other rocks.

"Not only do we know that the supernova happened, we can see what material was injected and how it changed the elemental and isotopic composition of our solar system," Brennecka told SPACE.com.

These findings are consistent with the notion that the solar system developed in an active star-forming region of the galaxy. Stellar nurseries are often home to stars that go supernova.

Future research can aim to better understand the fingerprints of this supernova in other samples "and how much influence it and possible other supernovae had on the development of our solar system," Brennecka said.

Brennecka and his colleagues Lars Borg and Meenakshi Wadhwa detailed their findings online Oct. 7 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.



Source: space.com

Physics professor warns ‘object with our name on it’ will hit Earth

Professor Michio Kaku calls Russian meteorite a "wake-up call" and touts the benefit of an early-warning telescope.

Physics professor Michio Kakuw warned on "CBS This Morning" about the threat of a large comet or asteroid colliding with Earth similar to the meteorite that struck the Russian city of Chelyabinsk earlier this year.

"One of these days, an object with our name on it is going to hit the Earth," Kaku said. Kaku, who currently teaches at City College of New York, called the Russian meteorite a "wake-up call."

According to Kaku, although "city-busting" sized meteorites only strike the planet about once every 100 to 200 years, the chances of football field-sized asteroids hitting the Earth are quite good because there is no program in place to prevent it. In order to help combat the problem, Kaku suggested building an early-warning telescope.

"It would cost chump change -- a few hundred million," he said. "But we have the giggle factor. Every time you talk to a politician about asteroids they start to giggle." He went on to say that the meteorite that struck Russia would have had the force of 20 Hiroshima bombs had it not exploded in outer space.

"The dinosaurs did not have a space program," Kaku said, "and that's why they're not here today. But we do have a space program but even then, we are sitting ducks."


Source: upi.com

Chelyabinsk meteorite: a message from God?

Divers have lifted more than 100 kg of space rock from Lake Chebarkul at the site of a meteorite explosion in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region. Laboratory tests showed that it was a typical chondrite, or stone meteorite, about 4.5 billion years old. Most meteorites are chondrites. While scientists are looking forward to getting new samples of the Chebarkul meteor, some people see it as God’s message to humanity.


Andrey Breyv, the head of the recently-founded Church of the Chelyabinsk Meteorite, argues that what happened over Chelyabinsk on February 15, 2013 was not a chance happening but a sign of what has long been talked of, namely that Russia may become the spiritual center of the world. Ten years ago, archeologists found an ancient human settlement, Akraim, near Chelyabinsk. God apparently chose that place for his “special information package” the world has been waiting for centuries, Breyv said in an interview.

“It’s a new package of knowledge designed to give us a new insight into the Aquarius Era. Finally, it has reached us in the form of a meteorite. We call that package ‘covenant’ by analogy with the Bible. Moses was the one who once received an information package which was more than just stone tablets with some symbols scribbled on it but a special message for Moses and his people. The world has changed a lot since then. The previous spiritual knowledge has been exhausted. The new package contains new scientific knowledge and a new code of moral norms and laws that will give humans a better life. What matters is that from now on spiritual and scientific knowledge will be a single whole,” Breyv said.

He claims that months before a meteorite splashed into Lake Chebarkul he and a few other people had felt God’s message approaching Earth.

“I had been preparing for it all my life, searching for a spiritual path. I possess extra-sensory capabilities and devoted my entire life to it. There are only twelve people in the world, the so-called lictors, who are able to understand the message, decode and interpret it. I am one of them. Before the meteorite, I had a protracted disease, the disease of shamans they call it. But the moment the meteorite struck, I felt much better. God sent me a revelation this summer. And then I realized that my spiritual search was over – I found what I had been looking for,” Breyv said.

He has got some 200 followers who communicate with each other through social networking sites. How many of them really believe in the “New Covenant” and how many are being driven by mere curiosity is hard to say. At present, the adepts have nothing beyond abstract faith, but they are planning to build a temple.

“Our main demand,” Breyv said, “is that the ‘tablets’ be lifted with care and handed over to our priests for further work. We want to build a temple where they could be stored and where any believer could approach the message not fearing to damage its information field. I am sure we will find an architect who will be inspired by divine power to create such a building. We think that the temple’s architecture should convey an image of the meteorite at the moment of explosion with columns rising all around it.”

An operation to recover what could be fragments of the meteorite from Lake Chebarkul where a large chunk of space rock presumably fell has been going on for three weeks now with Breyv closely following it. He always keeps some grains of meteorite dust in his pocket wherever he goes. When news spread that several fragments had been lifted, Breyv hurried to the scene to touch them.

The contract for the operation expires on October 4, but the contractor hopes that it will be prolonged. Sonars and other equipment point to a certain anomaly in the lake. Work is being impeded by a thick layer of ooze covering the bottom.




Source: http://voiceofrussia.com

Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/2013_10_04/Chelyabinsk-meteorite-a-message-from-God-1542/

Scientists collect over 100 kilos of Chelyabinsk meteorite pieces

Scientists have collected over 100 kilograms of fragments from the meteorite that blasted in the skies of the Chelyabinsk region, Russian Academy of Sciences Space Research Institute spokesman Yuri Zaitsev told Interfax-AVN on Friday.

"Several institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences organized expeditions immediately after the [meteorite] event in order to collect meteorite samples and to study the drop zone. The total weight of collected meteorite fragments exceeds 100 kilograms, and the heaviest piece weighs 3.4 kilograms," he said.

Laboratory tests identified the Chelyabinsk meteorite as a LL5 chondrite (only 2 percent of regulate chondrite meteorites, which fall on the Earth, belong to this class, and the Chelyabinsk event is the largest of them), Zaitsev said.

The meteorite event occurred on February 15, 2013. The meteorite blasted above the Lake Chebarkul in the Chelyabinsk region.

The mass of the object, which hit the Earth atmosphere, was roughly estimated at 11,000 tons. It had a diameter of 16-20 meters, rammed the atmosphere at a speed of about 18 kilometers per second and fell into pieces at the altitude of approximately 23 kilometers.

Scientists presume the meteorite's parent body belonged to the family of Apollo asteroids, a class of asteroids with Earth-crossing orbits. Its approximate age is 4.5 billion years. Isotope tests and the structure of meteorite fragments suggest that the parent body collided with another space object about 290 million years ago.

Fonte: http://rbth.co.uk