Cosmic News: a meteorite hit New Jersey, and we touch two new worlds
Cosmic News — curated by the Kingsway workshop. We work with meteorites every day; here's what's happening above our heads this month.
A meteorite crashed into a New Jersey home — and it's rewriting textbooks
We make our jewelry in New Jersey, so this one hits close to home — literally. A two-pound stone that tore through the roof of a Hillsborough, NJ house has turned out to be a rare CM carbonaceous chondrite. NASA's analysis found organic compounds and amino acids formed in briny water inside its parent asteroid — the very ingredients that may have seeded life on Earth. NASA's full study · phys.org report
Humanity touches two new worlds this summer
China's Tianwen-2 is collecting samples from asteroid Kamoʻoalewa — a body some scientists believe is a blasted-off fragment of the Moon itself. Meanwhile Japan's Hayabusa2, the probe that already brought asteroid dust back to Earth, is flying past asteroid Torifune this July.
Next stop: the asteroid we punched
ESA's Hera spacecraft arrives in November at Didymos — the double asteroid NASA's DART mission deliberately crashed into. It's the first close-up of a world humans have already moved.
