What’s weirder than a Himalayan lake packed with hundreds of skeletons? How about one that contains bony corpses separated by a thousand years of time?
Hey everyone! Did you see any of the amazing footage of that fireball over Spain and Portugal this morning? Wondering what it was?
Here’s a little thread for your Sunday reading.
Asteroid (rock and metal hunks of would-be worlds) hit Earth all the time, but some of them (a meter and bigger) are large enough to burn up quite furiously in the atmosphere. All that compressed, heated gas is great at cracking these open explosively.
Asteroid fragments move at ~17km/s, and even though they are often small, they carry with them a huge amount of kinetic energy which all gets dumped into the atmosphere when they explode in an air bursts.
☄️It’s true! NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has brought back 121 grams of ancient matter from an asteroid named Bennu. It cost of $1.2 billion. But what it can tell us about the dawn of the solar system, and the creation of life itself, is priceless.
So far, the team have looked at maybe 1% of the sample. But already, huge clues as to the journey Bennu has been on for the past 4.6 billion years have come to light, and were recently presented at the LPSC gathering in Texas.
One key query: what made the solar system? Bennu contains matter that was forged *before the Sun existed*, which means it preserves a record of the stars that died to seed the solar system. Isn’t that bonkers?
I’m literally writing the book on planetary defense, so I know things about errant space rocks. And asteroid 2023 DW – with its small-but-not-zero chance of hitting Earth on Feb 14, 2046 is making headlines.
So: let's sort a few things out, shall we?
Asteroids get discovered all the time, somewhat “near” to Earth.
2023 DW was first spotted on February 26th of this year by an optical observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. They saw it as glint of light far from home. neo.ssa.esa.int/search-for-ast…
This new preliminary report, but Turkish scientists, gives a detailed analysis on why the Turkish quakes of Feb 6 were so lethal. Sure, the quakes were powerful; they literally tore up the ground. But that’s not the part that really got my attention… temblor.net/temblor/prelim…
It’s the part on building damage.
They noticed that in the quakes, buildings were either only lightly damaged or were so severely damaged that many collapsed. Why would this be?
Turns out that many buildings either had quake-resistant features or designs, or they did not.
If they were up to code and we’re quake-resistant, then they mostly were just lightly damaged. If not, they probably collapsed. Only 7% of buildings fell into the “medium damage” category.
BREAKING: NASA’s pioneering InSight lander — Mars’s first fully-fledged robot geophysicist, one that provided the first internal map of another planet’s geologic innards — may have lost power and died.
Per a NASA update: “On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations.”
“It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022.