Possible Meteorite Crashes Through Roof of New Jersey Home
A metallic oblong-shaped rock may have made its way from space all the way to the surface of Earth, traveling hundreds of millions of miles only to land in New Jersey.
Computers Tech Games Crypto Music and More
A metallic oblong-shaped rock may have made its way from space all the way to the surface of Earth, traveling hundreds of millions of miles only to land in New Jersey.
In need of some extra cash? Well then, dust off your meteorite hunting boots and get yourself to rural Maine. A geology museum in the Pine Tree State has a mission for you, and if you succeed the prize is pretty big.
After more than a decade on Mars, NASA‘s Curiosity rover is quite used to traversing the Red Planet in solitude.
But last week, on its 3,724th Martian day rumbling over Mount Sharp, it encountered another foreign visitor, something that also traveled an extraordinary distance through space before winding up in the dusty barren desert: a one-foot-wide meteorite.
NASA is calling the space rock Cacao, one of a handful of meteorites the plucky robot has discovered since it arrived on Mars in 2012. Using its Mast Camera, Curiosity snapped a photo showing its new find on Jan. 27, with its own Johnny-5-like shadow creating a frame. The selfie [see below] has ragged edges because it is actually composed of six images stitched together.
“There’s no way to date these,” NASA said through its anthropomorphized Curiosity account on Twitter. “But it could have been here millions of years!”
On Earth, scientists estimate about 48.5 tons of billions-of-years-old meteor material rain down from space daily, much of which vaporizes in the atmosphere or falls into the ocean, which covers over 70 percent of the planet. More than 60,000 meteorites have been discovered on our planet. The vast majority comes from asteroids, but precious few originated on Mars or the moon, according to NASA. At least 175 identified here hail from the Red Planet.
“It could have been here millions of years!”
Curiosity, a car-size rover, and its predecessors have found meteorites before, and The Meteoritical Society is starting to keep a database of their finds. The international organization has given formal name recognition to 15 such specimens since 2005.
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
It’s not clear which planet, moon, or asteroid Cacao expatriated, but mission scientists say it’s an iron-nickel meteorite. This class of space rock isn’t rare among those found on Earth, but it is less common than stony meteorites. Other meteorites that rovers have discovered on their expeditions have had similar iron compositions.
Scientists speculate iron meteorites may be resistant to erosion on the Red Planet. That could explain why this big space rock appears to be sitting on flat ground rather than in a hole.
“There likely was a BIG crater in the ancient past,” Curiosity tweeted. “Over time, erosion and other forces flatten the area around it, carving away everything but the hardest material.”
Researchers combing the surface of Antarctica for space rocks hit the jackpot by finding five meteorites in the tundra, one of which weighs almost 17 pounds.
It wasn’t the average marsquake that the Insight Mars lander heard rip-roaring through the red planet’s ground last Christmas Eve.
NASA‘s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter apparently found the source of the rumble a couple of months later from its vantage point in space: a spectacular meteor strike over 2,000 miles away near Mars’ equator, estimated to be one of the largest impacts observed on the neighboring planet.
But what’s thrilled scientists perhaps as much as or more than the recorded seismic activity is what the meteor uncovered when it slammed into Mars — huge, boulder-size chunks of ice blasted out of the crater. Up until now, underground ice hadn’t been found in this region, the warmest part of the planet.
“This is really an exciting result,” said Lori Glaze, NASA’s director of planetary science, during a news conference Thursday. “We know, of course, that there’s water ice near the poles on Mars. But in planning for future human exploration of Mars, we’d want to land the astronauts as near to the equator as possible, and having access to ice at these lower latitudes, that ice can be converted into water, oxygen, or hydrogen. That could be really useful.”
The discovery, recently published in two related studies in the journal Science, is something of a grand finale for NASA’s Insight lander, which is losing power rapidly. Scientists have estimated they have about four to eight weeks remaining before they lose contact with the lander. At that point, the mission will end.
For the past four years, Insight has studied upward of 1,000 marsquakes and collected daily weather reports. It has detected the planet’s large liquid core and helped map Mars’ inner geology.
Program leaders have prepared the public for this outcome for some time. While the spacecraft has sat on the surface of Mars, dust has accumulated on its solar panels. The layers of grit from the red desert planet have blocked out the rays it needs to convert into power. The team has cut back on Insight’s operations to squeeze out as much science as possible before the hardware goes kaput.
Want more science and tech news delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter today.
Then, the team got a bit more bad news last month. A brutal dust storm swept over a large portion of Mar’s southern hemisphere. Insight went from having about 400 watt-hours per Martian day to less than 300.
“Unfortunately, since this is such a large dust storm, it’s actually put a lot of dust up into the atmosphere, and it has cut down the amount of sunlight reaching the solar panels by quite a bit,” said Bruce Banerdt, Insight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
But NASA believes scientists will continue to learn a lot about the past climate conditions on Mars and when and how ice was buried there from the fresh crater, which spans 500 feet wide and just shy of 70 feet deep.
They are confident the ice came from Mars and not the meteor, said Ingrid Daubar, a planetary scientist at Brown University who leads InSight’s impact science working group.
“An impact of this size would actually destroy the meteorite that came in to hit the surface,” she said. “We wouldn’t expect much, if any, of the original impactor to survive this high energy explosion.”
After the past three years, I’d have happily never heard the word “plague” again, let alone in the context of one of my favourite co-op games. Yet after an early play around with Deep Rock Galactic Season 3, I’m already sold that this update – which centers around a corrupting, planet-wide infection – could be its best one yet.
After repelling a robot-spamming rival corp across Seasons 1 and 2, your reward in Season 3 – which launches on November 3rd – is to find your mining operating pelted by a meteorite storm. And they’re carrying a nasty payload: Rockpox, a contagion that quickly infects both the caves of Hoxxes IV and the many, many giant bugs living within them. These sickly Glyphids and contaminated caverns will present you and your fellow space dwarves with some new perils, but also new opportunities to turn a management-pleasing profit. And isn’t providing value to shareholders why we’re all here to begin with?