Science

Scientists in both Europe and the United States are proceeding with plans to purposly smash a spacecraft into a large, nearby asteroid in 2022 to see what happens and to view inside the space rock.

The European led-"Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment" (AIDA) mission is due to launch in 2019, when it will launch two spacecraft - one built by scientists in the U.S., and the other built by the European Space Agency - for a three-year voyage to the astroid Didymos and its companion. Didymos is said to have no chance of impacting Earth, which is what makes it a good target for this mission.

Didymos is a binary asteroid system that consists of two separate space rocks that are bound together by gravity. The primary asteroid is huge, measuring, 2,625 feet across, and is orbited by a smaller asteroid that measures about 490 feet.

This binary asteroid system is an interesting target for AIDA because it will give scientists their first close look at the space rock system while also providing new insights into ways to deflect dangerous asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth.

In 2022, the Didymos asteroids will be 6.8 million miles from Earth during a close approach, which is the reason that the researchers have timed the mission for that year.

Scientists say that they were able to collect and preserve embryos from the world's most endangered wild cat - the Iberian lynx - by removing the ovaries.

Conservationists hope that the fertilized eggs could be implanted into a surrogate mother of a closely related species, possibly a Eurasian lynx female. Just one successful surrogate pregnancy could help the endangered felines, whose dwindling population was estimated at less than 200 a decade ago.

An Iberian lynx by the name of Azahar was a part of a breeding program in Silves, Portugal, but had difficulties giving birth and had to undergo two emergency Caesarean sections in two consecutive pregnancies.

Scientists say that the rocky space object that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago might not have been an asteroid, and could have instead been a comet.

The Chicxulub crater in Mexico, which measure 112-miles across, was made by the impact which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs and 70% of all species on Earth. According to a new study the crater was likely blasted out out by a faster, smaller object than originally thought.

Evidence of the object's impact is derived from a global layer of sediments that contain high levels of the element iridium, which is also known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary and could have have occurred on Earth naturally. The new research, which was presented last week at the 44th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

New research suggests that the often cited iridium values are incorrect. Researchers arrived at this conclusion by comparing these valued with levels of osmium, which is another element that was delivered via the impact. Their calculations indicate that the space rock generated less debris than had previously been thought, which implies that it was a smaller object than an asteroid. For something to have created a crater so large, it would have had to have been travelling exceptionally fast.

Jason Moore, a paleoecologist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said:

"How do we get something that has enough energy to generate that size of crater, but has much less rocky material? That brings us to comets."

At the end of the Triassic period at least half of the Earth's species, living on both land and in the ocean, went extinct. This paved the way for dinosaurs to take over and dominate for the next 135 million years. While scientists have suspected that massive volcanic eruptions were likely to blame for the mass extinctions, they had not been able to pin down the precise timing of the eruptions until now.

In a study published this week in the journal Science, researchers say that they've confirmed that eruptions that would have been large enough to bury the United States under 300 feet of lava occurred at the same time that large numbers of plant and animal species disappeared from fossil record.

Terence Blackburn, lead study author and a geologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C., explained that 201 million years ago, tectonic forces forces began ripping the supercontinent known as Pangaea apart.

Blackburn said that the underlying mantle rock melted, which generated these large eruptions. The rift happened between sections of Pangaea that would go on to become North America and Africa. This also eventually created the Atlantic Ocean basin.

The huge eruptions, which are also known as flood basalt events, happened during four periods over the course of 600,000 years. The first round of volcanism, however, is what contributed to the extinction of so many different organisms.

The margin of error in calculating the timing of these eruptions ranged between one and three million years, which thus led to uncertainty over which happened first - the eruptions or mass extinction. Using a rare mineral known as zircon, which is found in igneous rocks like basalts, the scientists were able to narrow down their margin of error to 20,000 to 30,000 years, which put the initial eruptions to just before the mass extinction event.

Two new species of lizards have been discovered in the rain forests of Peru in a little-explored area of the Andes Mountains in the northeast region of the South American country. Both of the new species are quite colorful, and feature splotches of green and brown that help them to blend into the mountain rain forests where they live.

The lizards were discovered in Cordillera Azul National Park, Peru's third-largest national park. One of the species, Enyalioides azulae, is named for the park. The second species, Enyalioides binzayedi, is found in the same river valley and is named after the man who helped to fund the survey, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the United Arab Emirates military. He created the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund to help preserve various species around the world.

Both Enyalioides azulae and Enyalioides binzayedi are a type of woodlizard, a group of lizards that were thought to only contain a handful of lizards. However, since 2008 three new species have been found in this group, in addition to the two newest discoveries, which suggests that more species could be waiting to be discovered in other unexplored areas near the Andes.

With temperatures hovering in the low-to-mid-20's here in Northeast Ohio and elsewhere just one day into Spring, it's hard to believe that spring has actually arrived. Even more difficult to imagine is the prediction that spring may even turn out to be warmer than normal throughout much of the United States. The National Weather Service contends that that majority of the U.S. will experience above-average temperatures over the next three months.

Laura Furgione made these predictions about spring during the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's spring climate outlook briefing held Thursday morning.

In addition to the warmer temperatures, drought is also expected to continue or even worse in much of the Southwest and central plains. Furgione added that 51 percent of the U.S. is in moderate or worse drought, also stating:

"We expect it to be drier than normal in much of the West, Rockies and Southwest, including Texas, which is unfortunate since we're looking at continued drought there."

Despite the drought in some areas of the country, flooding is likely in some regions, with the most severe possibilities occuring in North Dakota along the Red River. The upper and middle Mississippi River valley could also see some flooding, which may be worsened by melting of late season snow.

Launched in 1977 with the intention of exploring the outer planets, Voyager 1 has passed into a new region on its way out of the solar system, said scientists on Wednesday.

Voyager 1 is now more than 11 billion miles away, and may have actually exited the solar system, although that is still up for debates. However, on August 25, 2012, the spacecraft detected two distinct and related changes in its environment. It detected dramatic changes in the levels of two types of radiation - one that stays inside the solar system, and the other which comes from interstellar space.

Astronomer and lead study author Bill Webber, professor emeritus at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico, said that the number of particles inside the solar system's bubble in space, a region known as the heliosphere, dropped to less than 1 percent of previously detected levels. Meanwhile, radiation from interstellar sources nearly doubled.

Scientists, however, are not yet prepared to say that Voyager is in interstellar space. They believe that the probe may be in a new and previously unknown boundary region between the heliosphere and interstellar space, which Webber calls the "heliocliff". He added:

"It's outside the normal heliosphere. Everything we're measuring is different and exciting."

Titan, which is the largest of Saturn's dozens of moons, is covered with oceans and is usually so cold that methane falls as rain. However, new researcher suggests that the moon actually warms up enough in the summertime for high-speed cyclones to whip across its seas.

Sea evaporation may create enough energy to produce winds as high as 44mph on Titan, but whether cyclones form depends on what Titan's seas are made of. If more than half of an ocean is composed of methane, the chemical recipe would then be perfect for a storm.

The next step in determining whether or not cyclones do actually form on Titan would require getting Cassini, a NASA spacecraft that is orbiting Saturn and its moons, to go out and look for one.

Tetsuya Tokano, a researcher from the Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology at the University of Cologne, says:

"In the next few years, we will approach summer in the [northern] polar region and we might have the chance to see a cyclone, if the condition is favorable."

On Earth, cyclones happen in one of two ways. The first cannot happen on Titan because the temperature range is too small. Cyclones occur when cold fronts and warm fronts run into each other, the warm and cold air bend around each other and generate high-speed winds. The second happens when heat from Earth's water warms the air and makes it rise, creating an energy cycle that produces high-speed winds. As the cycle continues, it fuels a spinning storm. This second scenario could be happens on Titan.

Once believed to be lost forever on the bottom of the ocean, the massive engines that launched astronauts to the moon more than four decades ago have been found and recovered by a private expedition led by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

In an update posted to the Bezos Expeditions website on Wednesday, the Amazon CEO wrote:

"We found so much. We have seen an underwater wonderland – an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

When NASA's Saturn V rockets were launched on missions to Earth orbit and the moon during the late 1960s an 1970s, the five F-1 engines that powered each of the boosters' first stages dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and sank to the seafloor. They were expected to remain there forever, until one year ago, Bezos announced that his private expedition, which at that time was a secret, had located what they believed to be the engines from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission that started the journey to land the first humans on the moon.

NASA administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement:

"Nearly one year ago, Jeff Bezos shared with us his plans to recover F-1 engines. We share the excitement expressed by Jeff and his team in announcing the recovery of two of the powerful Saturn V first-stage engines from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

Bezos and his team are now headed back to port in Cape Canaveral, Fla., after having worked for three weeks on the Seabed Worker, a multipurpose support vessel.

Millions of years ago, a tectonic plate disappeared underneath North America, but new research finds that the plate still peeks out somewhat in central California and Mexico.

The Farallon oceanic plate was once located between the Pacific and North American plates, which had been converging about 200 million years ago at what would eventually become the San Andreas fault located along the Pacific coast. This geological movement thus forced the Farallon plate under North America. This process is called subduction.

Much of the Farallon plate was pushed down into the mantle, which is the molten layer located beneath the Earth's crust. Off of the coast, parts of the plate fragmented and some remnants were left at the surface, stuck to the Pacific plate.

The study found that these pieces of the Farallon plate that remain on the surface are attached to larger chunks. Part of the Baja region of Mexico and part of central California near the Sierra Nevada mountains sit upon slabs of the Farallon plate.

The findings of this study help to solve one of the mysteries of California geology. Earth scientists use seismic waves to map out the region beneath the Earth's surface. Softer and hotter materials slow down seismic waves, while they move faster through stiffer, cooler material. Seismic surveys in California have revealed a large mass of cool, dry material 62 miles to 124 miles beneath the surface.