"Heavy Metal! I found an iron meteorite on Mars" tweet from Curiosity

Dear readers and followers,

"Heavy Metal! I found an iron meteorite on Mars," Curiosity's handlers wrote on the mission's Twitter page.

Actually, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has discovered its first meteorite on the Red Planet, and it's no puny space rock.The new found Mars meteorite, which scientist have named "Lebanon," is nearly 2 meters wide and made of iron. Photos of the meteorite taken by Curiosity also revealed a smaller companion nearby, which is now dubbed "Lebanon B." "That 'Lebanon' is huge, almost 2 meters," said Guy Webster from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. 

While NASA released a detailed photo of the Lebanon meteorites Tuesday, July 15th, the Curiosity rover actually discovered the space rocks on May 25th. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Webster said Curiosity also found a third meteorite at the same time it spotted the Lebanon rocks. In a raw, unprocessed photo from Curiosity, the third meteorite, which is also about 2 meters wide, can be seen just beyond the closer Lebanon meteorites. Curiosity snapped detailed photos of the main Lebanon meteorite using its high-resolution Chem-Cam and Remote Micro-Imager cameras. The images revealed strange angular cavities in the surface of the rock.

Altogether, the three meteorites are the first space rocks on Mars discovered by the Curiosity rover since it landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, Webster added.

"One possible explanation is that they resulted from preferential erosion along crystalline boundaries within the metal of the rock," NASA officials wrote in a statement. "Another possibility is that these cavities once contained olivine crystals, which can be found in a rare type of stony-iron meteorites called pallasites, thought to have been formed near the core-mantle boundary within an asteroid."

On Aug. 5th, Curiosity will celebrate its second Earth-year anniversary on Mars. Since landing in 2012, the rover has found evidence that Mars could have been habitable for primitive life, a major mission goal, and has been making its way toward the huge Mount Sharp, which rises from the center of its Gale Crater landing site.

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Bright meteor over New Mexico on Saturday October 19th 2013

Curiosity confirms the Martian origin of some meteors on Earth

Dear followers,

After the discovery of of water on Mars, few weeks ago, the Curiosity rover is still performing this work. Actually, while the NASA was out due to the shutdown during 2 weekend, the +NASA 's rover analysed the Martian atmosphere. These analyses confirm that some meteorites that have dropped to Earth really are from the Red Planet.

A key new measurement of the inert gas argon in Mars' atmosphere by the laboratory on-board the rover, provides the most definitive proof yet of the origin of Mars meteorites while at the same time giving a way to rule out Martian origin of other meteorites.

Credits: +NASA / +NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 

The Curiosity measurements do not directly measure the current rate of atmospheric escape, but NASA's next mission to Mars, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), is designed to do so. This mission is being prepared at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a launch around November 18th 2013.

Sources: NASA

First ever strike of a comet on Earth

Dear followers,

The first ever evidence of a comet entering Earth’s atmosphere and exploding, raining down a shock wave of fire over Sahara desert in Egypt, has been discovered by a team of South African scientists from the University of Witwatersrand and international collaborators.

Credits: Terry Bakker

In 1997, in Egypt, close to the border with Libya, fragments of a natural silica-rich glass aged of around 28.5 million years, are found. The analyse of a stone and the comparison with specimen of the glass leads the scientists to discover the first ever comet striking Earth. 

Actually, the comet entered Earth’s atmosphere and exploded, heating up the Sahara's sand beneath it to a temperature of about 2 000 degrees Celsius, and resulting in the formation of a huge amount of yellow silica glass which lies scattered over a 6 000 km² area

An amazing specimen of the glass, polished by ancient Egyptian jewelers can be see on this brooch of Tutankhamun with its striking yellow-brown scarab.

"+NASA and +European Space Agency, ESA spend billions of dollars collecting a few micrograms of comet material and bringing it back to Earth, and now we’ve got a radical new approach of studying this material, without spending billions of dollars collecting it,” says Professor Jan Kramers of the University of Johannesburg.

Sources: Wits

Bright explosion ever observed on the Moon

Dear followers,

+NASA astronomers have been monitoring the Moon for signs of explosions due to meteorites hitting the lunar surface. This phenomenon is called "Lunar meteor showers"; and it have turned out to be more common than anyone expected. Actually hundreds of impacts are detected every year.

Credit: Nasa

"On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we've ever seen before."

Dear follower, you should know that anyone looking at the Moon at the moment of impact could have seen the explosion; no telescope required.

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An other meteorite ... this time in Connecticut, USA

After the meteorite seen in Argentina (video and photo), and other stone crashes in USA this time !

A rock that crashed through a house in Connecticut last weekend has been confirmed to be a meteorite.
The owner of the house, Larry Beck called police on April 20, 2013 and said a baseball-sized rock crashed through his home the night before, causing damage to his roof and pipes in the attic before cracking the ceiling in his kitchen.
Police reported that people from several towns in the area had called to report a loud boom that rattled windows last Friday evening.

Source from NBC Connecticut

Photo of the meteorite crossing the sky of Argentina 4 day ago

Dear follower,

we reported yesterday a video showing during a concert the meteorite which lighted the sky in Argentina 4 days ago.
Today we propose to you a photo taken during this great event !

Thanks to Claudio Pietrasanta for picture !

Meteorite lights the sky by night in Argentina

On April 20, 2013 in Argentina, a large meteorite was filmed in the sky. The video has been done during a concert by the group Los Tekis by a spectator. The meteorite lights the sky of Santiago del Estero in the north-western Argentina.

The video is really impressive !