Valuable Meteorite Crashes Into House: Oslo, Norway

A Norwegian family was shocked to find a valuable meteorite in their cottage house in the middle of Oslo.

The meteorite weighed around 585 grammes, which is around one pound, four ounces.

An astrophysicist from the University of Oslo investigated the meteorite and found it be genuine.

 "You can tell immediately that it's genuine from the burned crust, and you can also recognize it from how rough and unusual it is. It gives me goosebumps," Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard, astrophysicist at the University of Oslo stated.

According to researchers, such meteorites can a fetch lot of money, potentially worth more than $500,000. They are quite valuable to researchers as well as private collectors. Earlier, chunks of Mars have fetched $877 per gram.

"This family is very lucky," Serge Koutchmy, a researcher at the Paris Astrophysical Institute, reported. "First of all because the piece of meteorite did not cause much damage, and secondly, because it is worth a small fortune."

Near Earth Asteroid's near-miss

An Asteroid, estimated to be about 36ft in diameter, will pass within around 37,000 miles of the Earth at 4pm.

Although the asteroid – named 2012 BX34 – will travel past less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon, experts said there is no cause for concern.

"It's one of the closest approaches recorded," said Gareth Williams, associate director of the US-based Minor Planet Center.

"It makes it in to the top 20 closest approaches, but it's sufficiently far away ... that there's absolutely no chance of it hitting us," he told the BBC.

The asteroid's path makes it the closest space-rock to pass by the Earth since object 2011 MD in June 2011.

arlier estimates put the asteroid's closest distance at as little as 12,000 miles, near the distance at which geostationary satellites reside, but observations overnight showed it will pass at a more comfortable distance.

Although the asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye, Dr Williams said that keen backyard astronomers could get a look.

MARS HiRISE Image: Very Fresh Impact Crater Superposing a Wrinkle Ridge in Hesperia Planum

The ridge captured in this HiRISE image is called a wrinkle ridge.

This wrinkle ridge is located in Hesperia Planum, a region of over two million square kilometers (over 770,000 square miles) in the southern highlands of Mars.

It is located northwest of the Hellas basin and adjacent to Tyrrhena Patera and contains abundant orthogonal and intersecting wrinkle ridges.

Wrinkle ridges are long, winding topographic highs and are often characterized by a broad arch with superposed narrow asymmetric ridges. These features have also been identified on the Moon, Mercury, and Venus.

Their origin is attributed to horizontal compression or shortening of the crust due to faulting and folding. They commonly have asymmetrical cross sectional profiles and an offset in elevation on either side of the ridge.

Superposing or located on top of the wrinkle ridge, is a very fresh impact crater. We can tell that this crater is fresh because of its relatively sharp or crisp rim and unmodified shape.

If you look closely, you can see faint rays of relatively fine material, boulders, and smaller secondary craters radiating from the crater and superposing the wrinkle ridge and older surrounding craters.

ESA DLR Scientists assess likelihood of Earth-impacting comets

According to geological and observational records, the chance of a Near Earth Object (NEO) hitting our planet is entirely possible.

Now, a new international project called NEOShield will assess the likelihood of Earth’s collision with a deadly asteroid or comet and decide what to do about it should the event occur.

Led by the German space agency’s (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, the project began last week and will involve researchers from across Europe, Russia and the US.

According to Jonathan Amos of the BBC, an object around the size of a car enters the Earth’s atmosphere about once a year. An object the size of a football field enters the Earth’s atmosphere about every 2,000 years and every few million years, a rock enters the Earth’s atmosphere that could cause truly catastrophic damage.

While over 90 percent of these rocks have been identified and do not appear to be coming near the Earth, scientists will focus their efforts on investigating the other 10 percent and researching methods to deflect or lessen the effects of such an impact.

At the end of the three and a half year study, NEOShield scientists are hoping to propose their findings to politicians and launch a mission to demonstrate the appropriate technology, saving us from any scenarios reminiscent of Armageddon or Deep Impact.

Image: ESA

Chicxlub Impact Crater: Princeton model shows fallout of a giant meteorite strike

The Princeton model shows (at left) that the structure of the Earth's surface at the time of the meteorite impact that caused the Chicxulub crater in Mexico would have placed the Deccan Traps in India far west of the crater's antipodal point, instead of directly opposite of the impact. 

Correspondingly, the model shows (at right) that the meteorite struck far east of the antipodal point for the Deccan Traps, which are remnants of large volcanoes thought to have contributed to the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period. 

The model also revealed that the Chicxulub impact, when the Earth's surface and shape are considered, would have likely been too small to cause the Deccan Traps. (Images by Conor Myhrvold)

Seeking to better understand the level of death and destruction that would result from a large meteorite striking the Earth, Princeton University researchers have developed a new model that can not only more accurately simulate the seismic fallout of such an impact, but also help reveal new information about the surface and interior of planets based on past collisions.

Princeton researchers created the first model to take into account Earth's elliptical shape, surface features and ocean depths in simulations of how seismic waves generated by a meteorite collision would spread across and within the planet.

Current projections rely on models of a featureless spherical world with nothing to disrupt the meteorite's impact, the researchers report in the October issue of Geophysical Journal International.

The researchers, based in the laboratory of Jeroen Tromp, the Blair Professor of Geology in Princeton's Department of Geosciences, simulated the meteorite strike that caused the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, an impact 2 million times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb that many scientists believe triggered the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The team's rendering of the planet showed that the impact's seismic waves would be scattered and unfocused, resulting in less severe ground displacement, tsunamis, and seismic and volcanic activity than previously theorised.

The Princeton simulations also could help researchers gain insight into the unseen surface and interior details of other planets and moons, the authors reported.

The simulations can pinpoint the strength of the meteorite's antipodal focus - the area of the globe opposite of the crater where the energy from the initial collision comes together like a second, smaller impact.

The researchers found this point is determined by how the features and composition of the smitten orb direct and absorb the seismic waves.

Scientists could identify the planet or moon's characteristics by comparing a crater to the remnants of the antipodal point and calculating how the impact waves spread.

Lead author Matthias Meschede of the University of Munich developed the model at Princeton through the University's Visiting Student Research Collaborators program with co-authors Conor Myhrvold, who earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton in 2011, and Tromp, who also is director of Princeton's Institute for Computational Science and Engineering and a professor of applied and computational mathematics. Meschede describes the findings as follows:

Almahata Sitta Meteorites: Triple Asteroid Crash

The black fragment of Almahata Sitta meteorite number 15 shows up black against the lighter coloured rocks of the Nubian desert in northern Sudan.

CREDIT: Peter Jenniskens (SETI Institute/NASA Ames)

Meteorites that fell over Sudan in 2008 could have come from a space rock that was formed by a triple-asteroid pileup, a collision between three different types of space rocks, a new study finds.

Scientists analysed meteorite fragments that fell to Earth exactly three years ago today, on Oct. 7, 2008, and found that they contain an unusual mix of material from both primitive and evolved types of asteroids.

"Because falls of meteorites of different types are rare, the question of the origin of an asteroid harboring both primitive and evolved characteristics is a challenging and intriguing problem," study leader Julie Gayon-Markt, of the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in France.

Meteorite crashes towards Earth - Peru video

Scientists Build Gun to Mimic Meteorite Crash

Recreating how the seeds of life might have survived aboard an ancient meteorite that crashed to Earth is no small feat, but scientists have begun doing just that in a recent lab experiment. The project could help indicate whether life on Earth got its start from alien organic material that hitched a ride aboard space rocks.

Perhaps one of the likeliest building blocks of primordial life on Earth came in the form of amino acids, which are the basic components of proteins. And so a team of U.S. and European researchers focused on trying to replicate how well amino acids would fare when a meteorite slams into the ground.

"This study is the first which tested amino acid quantities similar to those found in real meteorites," said Marylene Bertrand, a biophysicist funded by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and lead author of the work published in the December issue of the journal Astrobiology.

More than 70 different amino acids have been found in meteorites that fell to Earth. Past studies have tested the survivability of many amino acids, but did not try to replicate the concentrations of organic molecules found in actual meteorites.

Bertrand's group also took the new step of testing the amino acids embedded inside saponite, a clay material found in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that represents a possible signature of water.

Read the full article here..