| Wednesday | 22 September 2004 | 2:28pm MDT | 2004-09-22 UTC 2028 |
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News briefs
Radar news: JPL's Lance Benner told the Minor Planet Mailing list (MPML) yesterday that “We detected echoes from near-Earth asteroids 11066 Sigurd, 66063 (1998 RO1), and 2004 RQ10 [PHA, see MPEC 2004-R38] at Arecibo over the last several days,” and mentions that tropical storm Jeanne “forced Arecibo to halt observations for about a day, but it did no serious damage to the telescope.” Cosmochemistry: A National Radio Astronomy Observatory September 20th news release tells about astronomers using the RCB Green Bank Telescope (GBT) discovering a simple sugar molecule (glycolaldehyde, a precursor to RNA and DNA) in a super-cold gas and dust cloud of the type that can collapse to form solar systems. Such formation builds more complex molecules, but “is such a hot process that any prebiotic molecules would likely be destroyed,” except those that are created and remain in young solar systems' cold outer comet regions, and then comets later seed the inner planets. |
The Asteroid/Comet Connection's Today's issue status: done
A University of California at Davis news release yesterday mentions “new theories about local variations in oxygen isotopes in the vast dust and gas cloud around the young sun,” isotopes that slightly vary between Earth, Moon, and some meteorites. Bits & pieces: New Scientist tells today about a mission to study how liquid sloshes in microgravity, which “may have caused NASA's NEAR spacecraft to cut short a 1998 engine burn that would have helped put it into orbit around its target asteroid, [433] Eros,” delaying that a year. [ ] There is now a Web site for the November 2004 Space Resources Roundtable (SRR) on developing asteroids, the Moon, and Mars. |
