Onions and Asteroids

Asteroid 4 Vesta (right) and an onion (Vesta image: Ben Zellner, Georgia Southern University; Peter Thomas, Cornell University; NASA) If you want to look inside an onion, all you need to do is cut it with a knife. Easy! But, if you want to look inside an asteroid, the problem is not so straightforward. One…

The darkest hour is just before the dawn

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on its way to Vesta and Ceres after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 7.34 am (EDT) on 27 September 2007 It seems as if unmanned probes are finally getting the media attention they deserve. The long journey home of Hayabusa was, in the truest sense, a space odyssey.…

Win a piece of Mars

(Image: Estelle Greenwood) Would you like to own a little piece of the red planet? Well now you have the chance. New Scientist magazine are currently running a competition in which the star prize is a Martian meteorite. It goes by the not very spectacular name of NWA 2975. By now you are probably asking:…

A Two-Way Street

BIMS members, (from left to right) Graham Ensor, Kieron Heard, Martin Goff and Matt Smith, visiting the PSSRI clean meteorite storage facility (Image: Martin Goff). It was a great pleasure earlier this month to welcome Matt Smith, Kieron Heard, Martin Goff and Graham Ensor of the British and Irish Meteorite Society (BIMS) to the Open…