Recently Seen News

In HPL's Colous Out of Space, it was obvious that his fascination for astronomy and chemistry came together in his weird imagination to make a meteor the theme of his story. Meteors always fascinate us, because they are true aliens to our world.

Elizabeth Wilson, Astronomy: Found Meteorites Could Aid Asteroid Studies, March 30, 2009, Chemical and Engineering Magazine.

Chrispy’s digest: Recently meteorites sprayed over the Nubian Desert in northern Sudan (October 2008). The uniqueness of this event is that the precise fragmentation of an asteroid is known and was tracked to the minute of disintegration in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Hundreds of the fragments were collected, and found to consist of dark, fragile, porous rock. Analysis continues.

Colour Almost Out of Space

Phew! Asteroid's passing was a cosmic near-miss

From 3 March 2009
PASADENA, Calif. – An asteroid about the size of one that blasted Siberia a century ago just buzzed by Earth.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported that the asteroid zoomed past Monday morning.

The asteroid named 2009 DD45 was about 48,800 miles from Earth. That is just twice the height of some telecommunications satellites and about a fifth of the distance to the Moon.

The space ball measured between 69 feet and 154 feet in diameter. The Planetary Society said that made it the same size as an asteroid that exploded over Siberia in 1908 and leveled more than 800 square miles of forest.

Most people probably didn't notice the cosmic close call. The asteroid was only spotted two days ago (1 March 2009) and at its closest point passed over the Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.