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Hot Topic
Solar System
Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids
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Did Jupiter Cook the Meteorites?
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
03/06/05 |
| Scientists now believe that the formation of Jupiter, the heavy-weight champion of the Solar System's planets, may have spawned some of the tiniest and oldest constituents of our Solar System -- millimeter-sized spheres called chondrules, the major component of primitive meteorites. |
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Comet Blaster Blasts Off
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
01/12/05 |
| The Deep Impact spacecraft launched today and is now on its way to a rendezvous with comet Tempel 1. On July 4th, a specially designed impact spacecraft will detach from the mothership and crash head-on into the comet. |
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Poor Man's Space Probe
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
01/09/05 |
| To see the world in a grain of sand has a resonant poetry when astronomers try to understand the rain of dust and meteors that blanket the Earth daily. It turns out that doing astronomy with a microscope has its benefits, particularly when the extraterrestrial samples arrive at our doorstep. |
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Catching a Comet
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
12/31/04 |
| Counting down the top ten astrobiology stories for 2004 highlights the accomplishments of those exploring Mars, Saturn, comets, and planets beyond Pluto. Number five in this countdown was the Stardust mission and its capture of comet dust for Earth return. |
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Cometary Big Dig
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
12/20/04 |
| The Deep Impact mission will send a large copper projectile crashing into the surface of a comet at more than 20,000 miles per hour, creating a huge crater and revealing never before seen materials and the internal compostion and structure of a comet. |
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Preparing for Deep Impact
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
12/14/04 |
| The Deep Impact mission will deploy a probe that essentially will collide with the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 at approximately 37,000 kph (23,000 mph). The probe is designed to excavate a crater in the comet about the size of the Roman Coliseum, while a nearby spacecraft will be taking pictures and data continuously. |
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Did an Asteroid Trigger the Great Dying?
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
11/30/04 |
| The devastating cycles of plant and animal extinctions have spawned different schools of thought: Did the earth or the heavens bring catastropher? |
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Leonid Meteors, 2004
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
11/13/04 |
| The Leonid meteor shower is an annual mid-November chance to view comet dust as it passes across the Earth's orbit. |
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Tugboat as Lifeboat?
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
11/10/04 |
| Among the proposals for diverting an asteroid collision with Earth, one involves gently pushing the incoming rock over the course of a year. This low-thrust solution has its challenges since at various stages of that perilous year, if it ever came, locations on Earth would naturally see human influences as they became the bullseye. |
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Did Bees Survive When Dinosaurs Couldn't?
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| Topic: Meteorites, Comets and Asteroids |
11/06/04 |
| The reign of tropical honeybees may have outlasted the great dinosaur age, and if true, the clue may raise questions about whether a single, cataclysm really took the Earth into a prolonged winter. One paleontologist looks not to what died, but what survived the events from 65 million years ago. |
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