The small capsule turned into a fireball as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and landed in a remote part of Australia.
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A space probe carrying samples from an asteroid has been retrieved from the remote Australian outback after a six-year mission.
The capsule from the unmanned Hayabusa2 carried the first extensive samples of dust from an asteroid.
It lit up as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere early on Sunday and landed in the Woomera restricted area, about 285 miles north of Adelaide.
While you're here, how about this:
Rochester researchers uncover key clues about the solar system's history : NewsCenter
Illustration of solar wind flowing over asteroids in the early solar system. The magnetic field of the solar wind (white line/arrows) magnetizes the asteroid (red arrow). Researchers at the University of Rochester used magnetism to determine, for the first time, when carbonaceous chondrite asteroids first arrived in the inner solar system. (University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw)
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"There is special interest in defining this history—in reference to the huge number of exoplanet discoveries—to deduce whether events might have been similar or different in exo-solar systems," says John Tarduno , the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and dean of research for Arts, Sciences & Engineering at Rochester. "This is another component of the search for other habitable planets."
Gaia Space Telescope Measured The Acceleration Of The Solar System - SpaceRef
The Gaia space telescope has measured the acceleration of the Solar System when it orbits the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
The Solar System motion relative to the stars agrees with the results by Finnish astronomers in the 19th century.
Moreover, the observational data by Gaia improves satellite navigation. Finnish researchers are participating in this massive endeavor, that results in three-dimensional mapping of our galaxy, to be completed in 2024.
You can see every planet in our solar system this week
This week, there will be some not so familiar sights in the sky: Seven planets will be visible at various points in the day.
Venus and Mercury are bright enough to see in the mornings, while Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn will be easier to see at night.
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Joe Guzman, an astronomer and educator at After School Matters in Chicago, has already told his students about this week's celestial phenomenon.
"Early this morning, I took the time to get a look at the crescent moon," Guzman told CNN. "And when the sun sets tonight, you'll definitely be able to see Jupiter and Saturn."
Were you following this:
There are weird volcanoes everywhere we look in the solar system | New Scientist
Kilauea is just one of many impressive volcanoes. About 60 have erupted on Earth this year alone. Before we had the ability to explore beyond Earth, many assumed that this planet was where it stopped; that you could never stand atop an active volcano on another world in this solar system because they just weren’t out there. The rest of our solar system seemed geologically dead.
We now know that is far from true, and have evidence that volcanism exists beyond Earth in strange forms and in the most unexpected places. There are plumes spurting into space around Saturn and ice volcanoes on Pluto . Even lumps of rock in the asteroid belt produce their own unusual brand of lava. Finding these fascinating features – and how they came to exist – gives us a window into the innards of the solar system’s most mysterious worlds.
Solar System likely to disintegrate sooner than earlier predictions: Study
Astronomers have been trying to understand the ultimate fate of the Solar System for at least hundreds of years now. In the latest study, researchers tried to study the long-term dynamical stability of the solar system constituted by Newton who speculated that mutual interactions between planets would eventually drive the solar system unstable.
According to the researchers, the greater the number of bodies that are involved in a dynamical system, interacting with each other, the more complex that system grows and the harder it is to predict and this is called the 'N-body problem'.
Asteroid news: Early solar system resembled arcade game 'Asteroids' - study | Science |
In 1992, a 30 pound meteorite smashed into the back of a car in New York, with the owner of the car reporting the space rock was still warm when he touched it.
Almost 30 years on, researchers are still studying said meteorite, which has led to a new hypothesis about how asteroids formed during the early years of the solar system.
The meteorite, along with others which were study, is an early remnant of an asteroid from the beginning of the solar system.
NASA's Voyagers Can Feel the Sun in Interstellar Space - The Atlantic
But there are some things to feel , in the sense that a spacefaring machine can feel something. Even this far out, the sun can still make its presence known.
"We're really discovering that what we thought would be this quiet, pristine interstellar medium is actually disturbed considerably" by the sun, Don Gurnett, a University of Iowa professor emeritus of physics and astronomy, who led the research, told me.
This is where the Voyagers are, beyond the heliosphere. Kurth once published a commentary in a science journal that said leaving the heliosphere was more or less the same as leaving the solar system. "I was soundly criticized," he said, laughing. Because while the solar wind blows quite far—120 astronomical units, with a single unit equal to the distance between the Earth and the sun—our star's influence extends even deeper. Not through warmth, but through gravity.
Happening on Twitter
A Japanese capsule carrying the first samples of asteroid subsurface shot across the night atmosphere before succes… https://t.co/blQYtiTtz5 AP (from Global) Sun Dec 06 12:01:05 +0000 2020
Japan's space agency says its final checks confirmed the Hayabusa2 spacecraft is on track to return to Earth a caps… https://t.co/YPFqMV8MNE AP (from Global) Sat Dec 05 06:31:03 +0000 2020
As you read this, indispensable clues to the origins of the known universe are plummeting from unimaginable heights… https://t.co/UWDdx2zsuM NPR Sat Dec 05 18:54:26 +0000 2020
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