Thursday 19 October 2017

FT summary of current space mining plans


The Financial Times has just published a handy layman's digest
of what various countries and private companies
are currently focusing upon in terms of preparing the ground
for future space mining ventures.


Monday 16 October 2017

"Shangri-La meteorites" for sale?


Since a fireball over China was sighted on 4 October 2017,
the hunt for fragments of a new meteorite has been on
but there has been no scientific evidence so far
that any authentic samples have as yet been found
(although some have allegedly already been sold).

A concisely instructive article on this particular topic
 has recently been published by XINHUANET,
which also focuses on the subject of related ownership rights in China.



Saturday 14 October 2017

Goodbye flyby and see you later

Having come within 8,000 kilometres
of  "the 36,000 km plane at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit our planet"
Asteroid 2012 TC4 has gone (for now)
but should be back in 2050
and (perhaps dangerously closer) in 2079.



Wednesday 4 October 2017

60 years ago: Sputnik 1


beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep
that's how it all began


Picture by JR. CHINREST

There is a very interesting 4th October 2017 article
by Matthew Bodner in Spacenews.com
on the former Soviet Union and on Russia's space endeavours,
entitled "60 years after Sputnik, Russia is lost in space".



Tuesday 3 October 2017

Martian impact 55 years ago today


On 3rd October 1962 an 18 kilogram Mars meteorite
(the largest of its kind found so far)
narrowly missed a farmer as it crashed into a field
near Zagami Rock in the Katsina Province of Nigeria.

Since the late 1980s much of this meteorite 
has been repeatedly cut up into increasingly finer pieces
so that it has become the most widely distributed Martian meteorite ever.
The so-called Lucite "Mars Cube", for instance, 
contains an embedded vial with just 1/10 carat 
of what is officially known as "Zagami".


                                                   Link to: jpl.nasa.gov Zagami webpage
                                                   Link to: The Meteoritical Society

                                                       ( For current research findings on
                                    " environments that would have been potentially habitable
                                          for Earth-like life on Mars", follow the link below:
                                        Link to: Los Angeles Times, Science Now, 2 Oct 2017 )