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Instead of a cosmic rock, the newly discovered object appears to be an old rocket from a failed moon-landing mission 54 years ago that's finally making its way back home, according to NASA's leading asteroid expert. Observations should help nail its identity. 2020 SO, as it is formally known, is actually the Centaur upper rocket stage that successfully propelled NASA's Surveyor 2 lander to the moon in 1966 before it was discarded. The lander ended up crashing into the moon after one of its thrusters failed to ignite on the way there. The rocket, meanwhile, swept past the moon and...

In just a few days, NASA is going to bounce its probe OSIRIS-REx off asteroid Bennu. The mission will collect a sample from the asteroid, and return it to Earth for closer study - one of the first missions of its kind. That return sample will help us to understand not just asteroids, but the earliest days of the Solar System's existence. However, that is not the sole mission of OSIRIS-REx. The probe arrived in Bennu orbit in December of 2018, and since that time has been using its suite of instruments to learn as much as it can about...

Roger Penrose’s theoretical work demonstrated the objects could form. Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez independently discovered a supermassive one at the center of the Milky Way. Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, and Andrea Ghez are to be awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for their theoretical and observational work on black holes, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Tuesday. Penrose will receive half the 10 million Swedish krona (roughly $1.1 million) prize; Ghez and Genzel will share the other half. Penrose, of the University of Oxford, helped place the previously idealized concept of a black hole on sound...

Explanation: Look to the east just after sunset tonight and you'll see a most impressive Mars. Tonight, Mars will appear its biggest and brightest of the year, as Earth passes closer to the red planet than it has in over two years -- and will be again for another two years. In a week, Mars will be almost as bright -- but at opposition, meaning that it will be directly opposite the Sun. Due to the slightly oval shape of the orbits of Mars and Earth, closest approach and opposition occur on slightly different days. The featured image sequence shows...

JACINTA BOWLER 5 OCTOBER 2020 Mars, our second closest cosmic cousin, has been in our collective imagination for decades. Between fantasies of martian visits and the promise of water under its icy surface, Mars doesn't need to do much to be in our collective good books. But very soon, Mars is not just going to be close to our hearts, but also nearest to our actual planet - a mere 62.1 million kilometres (38.6 million miles) away from Earth. This is the closest it'll be for the next 15 years. And it means that stargazing is highly recommended as Mars...

In its 4.5 billion year history, Earth has had to run the gauntlet. Numerous catastrophes have imperilled the planet, from massive impacts, to volcanic conflagrations, to frigid episodes of snowball Earth. Yet life persists. Among all of the hazards that threaten a planet, the most potentially calamitous might be a nearby star exploding as a supernova. When a massive enough star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova (SN). The hyper-energetic explosion can light up the sky for months, turning night into day for any planets close enough. If a planet is too close, it will...

This one is a video, at link. Explanation: Does the Sun change as it rotates? Yes, and the changes can vary from subtle to dramatic. In the featured time-lapse sequences, our Sun -- as imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory -- is shown rotating though an entire month in 2014. In the large image on the left, the solar chromosphere is depicted in ultraviolet light, while the smaller and lighter image to its upper right simultaneously shows the more familiar solar photosphere in visible light. The rest of the inset six Sun images highlight X-ray emission by relatively rare iron...

While we often discuss expansion into the Solar System as a step leading to interstellar flight, the movement into space has its dark side, as author Daniel Deudney argues in a new book. As Kenneth Roy points out in the review that follows, it behooves everyone involved in space studies to understand what the counter-arguments are. Ken is a newly retired professional engineer who is currently living amidst, as he puts it, “the relics of the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.” His professional career involved working for various Department of Energy (DOE) contractors in the fields of fire protection...

In its 4.5 billion year history, Earth has had to run the gauntlet. Numerous catastrophes have imperilled the planet, from massive impacts, to volcanic conflagrations, to frigid episodes of snowball Earth. Yet life persists. Among all of the hazards that threaten a planet, the most potentially calamitous might be a nearby star exploding as a supernova. Whan a massive enough star reaches the end of its life, it explodes as a supernova. The hyper-energetic explosion can light up the sky for months, turning night into day for any planets close enough. If a planet is too close, it will be...

A superbolide was recorded flying over the states of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina, Brazil on October 1, 2020. Trajectory Preliminary analyses show that the very bright fireball began to shine at about 89.5 km over the rural area to the east of Caxias do Sul and travelled north, at 16.9 km/s (60,900 km/h) at an entrance angle of 44° to the ground The bight meteor disintegrated during 6 seconds, easily overcoming the full moon’s brightness and finally exploded at an altitude of 22 km over the city of Vacaria, also in Rio Grande do Sul state. A...

The Uranus reversal begins a backward journey that will carry through early January 2021. Our surprises are about to get more baffling, random, disparate and mysterious. This is also very thrilling, as it provides the sort of work that requires making sense of the nonsense. Life is a puzzle, the solving of which will be extremely satisfying....

A follow on to yesterday's "Biking to the Moon". Explanation: How long would it take to drive to the Sun? Brittany age 7, and D.J. age 12, ponder this question over dinner one evening. James also age 7, suggests taking a really fast racing car while Christopher age 4, eagerly agrees. Jerry, a really old guy who is used to estimating driving time on family trips based on distance divided by speed, offers to do the numbers. "Let's see ... the Sun is 93 million miles away. If we drove 93 miles per hour the trip would only take us...

Illustrations of Beta Pictoris system (l.; c.); the system's dimensions (r.). (GRAVITY Collaboration/Axel M. Quetz, MPIA Graphics Department) ================================================================================ Most of the exoplanets we've confirmed to date have never actually been seen directly. We confirm their presence by indirect means, such as the effect they have on their host star. But now, astronomers have revealed images of an indirectly found exoplanet. It's not just an impressive feat of skills and technology. The combination of methods has given us a superb toolkit for measuring an exoplanet. For the first time, astronomers have measured both the brightness and the mass of...

Gold is an element, which means you can't make it through ordinary chemical reactions — though alchemists tried for centuries. To make the sparkly metal, you have to bind 79 protons and 118 neutrons together to form a single atomic nucleus. That's an intense nuclear fusion reaction. But such intense fusion doesn't happen frequently enough, at least not nearby, to make the giant trove of gold we find on Earth and elsewhere in the solar system. And a new study has found the most commonly-theorized origin of gold — collisions between neutron stars — can't explain gold's abundance either. So...

OSIRIS-REx — an international sample-return mission led by NASA and joined by science team members from Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, and with an instrument provided through the Canadian Space Agency — is less than one month away from performing a Touch-And-Go sample collection maneuver to return portions of asteroid Bennu to Earth. Meanwhile, science teams have observed regular material shedding activity from the near Earth object — an unexpected find that allows scientists to better understand the dynamic little worlds littered throughout the inner solar system.

Most of these interstellar spacecraft carry messages intended to introduce ourselves to any aliens that find them along the way. In 1972, NASA hadn't even finished sending Apollo astronauts to the Moon yet when it started launching the first missions that would ultimately wind up in interstellar space. That wasn't the end goal though. Pioneer 10 and 11 were primarily intended to do humanity's first major reconnaisance of other planets in our solar system. Pioneer 10 achieved the first flyby of Mars, the first trip through the asteroid belt, and the first flyby of Jupiter. And the secret to its...

Explanation: Triple star system GW Orionis appears to demonstrate that planets can form and orbit in multiple planes. In contrast, all the planets and moons in our Solar System orbit in nearly the same plane. The picturesque system has three prominent stars, a warped disk, and inner tilted rings of gas and grit. The featured animation characterizes the GW Ori system from observations with the European Southern Observatory's VLT and ALMA telescopes in Chile. The first part of the illustrative video shows a grand vista of the entire system from a distant orbit, while the second sequence takes you inside...

Three new underground lakes have been detected near the south pole of Mars. Scientists also confirmed the existence of a fourth lake - the presence of which was hinted at in 2018. Liquid water is vital for biology, so the finding will be of interest to researchers studying the potential for life elsewhere in the Solar System. But the lakes are also thought to be extremely salty, which could pose challenges to the survival of any microbial life forms. Billions of years ago, water flowed in rivers and pooled in lakes on the Martian surface. But Mars has since lost...

A network of salty ponds may be gurgling beneath Mars' South Pole alongside a large underground lake, raising the prospect of tiny, swimming Martian life. Italian scientists reported their findings Monday, two years after identifying what they believed to be a large buried lake. They widened their coverage area by a couple hundred miles, using even more data from a radar sounder on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter. In the latest study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy, the scientists provide further evidence of this salty underground lake, estimated to be 12 miles to 18 miles (20 kilometers...

Two years ago, planetary scientists reported the discovery of a large saltwater lake under the ice at Mars’s south pole, a finding that was met with excitement and some scepticism. Now, researchers say they’ve confirmed the presence of that lake — and found three more. The discovery, reported on 28 September in Nature Astronomy1, was made using radar data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. It follows the detection of a single subsurface lake in the same region in 2018 — which, if confirmed, would be the first body of liquid water ever detected on the...