This week’s Carnival of Space is hosted by Zain Husain at the Brownspaceman.com blog. Check out this week’s sampling of space-related stories from our colleagues and friends! Click here to read Carnival of Space #456. And if you’re interested in looking back, here’s an archive to all the past Carnivals of Space, thanks to our […]
Tag Archives | Asteroid
Vesta’s Giant Impact
Vesta is, in so many ways, the weirdest world that you are mapping here on CosmoQuest. It’s small enough to be non-spherical and is covered in the scars of its many impacts. The largest impact basins on its southern pole are records of some of the most defining moments in Vesta’s history. They are even […]
Send A Message to an Asteroid
The OSIRIS-Rex mission is launching to asteroid Bennu in 2016, and you can virtually go along! The team is sending a time capsule full of images and statements about our exploration of the Solar System to be opened when the spacecraft resumes with a piece of Bennu in 2023. You can join the time capsule […]
Peeking Inside Vesta
The Dawn spacecraft has given us stunning images of Vesta to work through on the Asteroid Mappers project. It’s also given some key data about the interior and history of this huge asteroid. Vesta is the second largest asteroid in the Solar System, meaning that it is very much like the planetesimals, or embryos that […]
In-Vesta-Gating a World
This week, we’re doing a teacher professional development workshop with 20 Illinois teachers and covering In-Vesta-Gate, our unit on small bodies in the Solar System. In preparation, I’ve been refreshing my knowledge of Vesta, asteroids, and all the lovely tiny bits that make our Solar System such an interesting place to live. First off, I […]
What’s In an Asteroid?
Asteroid (25143) Itokawa is a peanut-shaped near Earth asteroid that doesn’t actually present a threat to Earth, but has given us an amazing opportunity to study such asteroids up close. Although a lot smaller than their cousins Vesta and Ceres which are being visited by the Dawn spacecraft, such near Earth asteroids are important for […]
Water Plumes on Ceres
We got some lovely news last week that was almost eclipsed by the very exciting supernova in M82. It turns out that asteroid/dwarf planet Ceres has water geysers jetting out from its surface. Ceres has a storied history, first being dubbed a planet upon its discovery in 1801, then demotion to asteroid 50 years later. […]