Tag: asteroids
-
Cold War treaties aren’t sufficient for the era of asteroid mining
Why did I, a physics/astronomy journalist, write about asteroids for a deep-sea mining trade magazine? Read on! Oh yes, and pledge to my book of science comics with Maki Naro, Who Owns an Asteroid? [ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the […]
-
Asteroids, Mars, and a vision for space beyond colonialism
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Who owns an asteroid? Celestial bodies like Bennu could help us tell Earth’s origin story. Or they could be strip-mined for resources Discussions around space travel are saturated in […]
-
Strange asteroid may have been born in another star system
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] And if I can be shameless: Forbes pays according to traffic, so the more of you who share and visit and read my stuff, the better they pay me. […]
-
The first known interstellar visitor to the Solar System
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Cosmic Driftwood What a floating rock can tell us about life in the rest of the universe Last October, we had the first known interstellar visitor to the Solar […]
-
There (to an asteroid) and back again: a robot’s journey
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This Thursday, the OSIRIS-REx robotic probe will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, destined for asteroid Bennu. I can’t ride with the probe, but I’m doing the next best […]
-
Don’t pull up stakes for the asteroid-mining gold rush
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Is Space Becoming a Gold Mine? A new law grants private companies ownership over the materials they extract from asteroids or the Moon. But don’t call it a gold […]
-
Bathing asteroids with nuclear weapons
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] A gentle nudge with a nuke: deflecting Earth-bound asteroids From Ars Technica: In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the […]
-
A space robot arrives at a new world: Dawn at Ceres
Sunday is my birthday, and NASA kindly decided to give me a whole asteroid. I got to write about it for The Daily Beast. NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Made It to Dwarf Planet Ceres From The Daily Beast: When I was young, I obsessively read through a National Geographic science book called Our Universe, a good […]
-
All the single centaurs
Saturn’s magnificent rings have been known since Galileo observed the planet’s “ears” in his telescope. In the last few decades, researchers found rings (albeit less shiny ones) around the other giant planets — Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. And now the small asteroid Chariklo has joined the ring cycle: observations revealed it has two narrow rings, […]
-
Kaboom! A simulation shows how impacts shaped and nearly destroyed Vesta
Vesta is the second-largest asteroid in the Solar System, and recent measurements by the Dawn mission showed that it’s actually a protoplanet: a piece of planet-like material left over from the early days of our Solar System. However, Dawn is significantly non-spherical and very battered. Most notably, it has two huge overlapping craters near its […]
Bowler Hat Science 