On April 21, the 2012 Lyrid meteor shower peaked in the skies over Earth. While NASA allsky cameras were looking up, astronaut Don Pettit aboard the International Space Station trained his video camera on Earth below. Video footage has revealed breathtaking images of meteors ablating — or burning up — over Earth at night. This video is a composite of 310 still frames from that evening. (NASA/JSC/Don Pettit)
Category Archives: comets, asteroids, meteors
Highspeed bypass
It might not look as spectacular as an F18/A Hornet on a 60 ft. Mach One highspeed bypass at the Mythbusters show, but it’s faster than you think, even in timelapse.
Finally it starts Dawning
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has provided researchers with the first orbital analysis of the giant asteroid Vesta, yielding new insights into its creation and kinship with terrestrial planets and Earth’s moon.
Vesta now has been revealed as a special fossil of the early solar system with a more varied, diverse surface than originally thought. Scientists have confirmed a variety of ways in which Vesta more closely resembles a small planet or Earth’s moon than another asteroid. Results appear in today’s edition of the journal Science.
“Dawn’s visit to Vesta has confirmed our broad theories of this giant asteroid’s history, while helping to fill in details it would have been impossible to know from afar,” said Carol Raymond, deputy principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Dawn’s residence at Vesta of nearly a year has made the asteroid’s planet-like qualities obvious and shown us our connection to that bright orb in our night sky.” …(DAWN Mission)
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Meet Fomalhaut, comet eater
There were times we believed stars would remain specks in our telescopes forever. It would be impossible to look at details on the star itself or in their surroundings. That was not so long ago. At this very moment some amateur astronomers are already helping professional astronomers in their quest to find exoplanets by transits. The time will come soon amateurs will be able to look directly at exoplanets themselves. In the meantime the big guns in space and on Earth keep astounding us with pictures like this. It’s Fomalhaut at a distance of 25 lightyear and it’s not even about exoplanets, but about comets. Fomalhaut has at least one planet, Fomalhaut b, and it’s something of a specialty, because it was observed directly. In the meantime comets are crushed to dust at an “alarming” rate.
ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has studied the dusty belt around the nearby star Fomalhaut. The dust appears to be coming from collisions that destroy up to thousands of icy comets every day.
Fomalhaut is a young star, just a few hundred million years old, and twice as massive as the Sun. Its dust belt was discovered in the 1980s by the IRAS satellite, but Herschel’s new images of the belt show it in much more detail at far-infrared wavelengths than ever before…. (ESA)
2012 EG5 on its way
“Asteroid 2012 EG5 will safely pass Earth on April 1. Distance: 230,000 km/143,000 miles, or .6 lunar distance. Size: est. 48 meters.” NASA Asteroid Watch tweets. Here you can see its orbit and details. No need to duck.
(ed.: chart updated)
Yes, it is
“Is that a meteor?”