On the morning of November 13, mission controllers confirmed that ESA`s comet chaser Rosetta had swung by Earth at 8:45 CET as planned, skimming past our planet to pick up a gravitational boost for an epic journey to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014. Rosetta passed over the ocean, just South of the Indonesian island of Java, at exactly 08:45:40 CET, at a speed of 13.34 km/s ...

A newly discovered asteroid designated 2009 VA, which is only about 7 meters in size, passed about 2 Earth radii (14,000 km) from Earth`s surface Nov. 6 at around 16:30 EST. This is the third-closest known (non-impacting) Earth approach on record for a cataloged asteroid. The two closer approaches include the 1-meter sized asteroid 2008 TS26, which passed within 6,150 km of Earth`s surface on Octo...

The discovery of a new species of dinosaur from the early Jurassic period (approximately 195 million years old and seven metres long) has been announced and described by Dr Adam Yates, the primary investigator and a palaeontologist from the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research (BPI) from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The vegetarian dinosaur, one o...

One small step for mankind is now a leap for averting natural and man-made disasters on earth. New Tel Aviv University technology combines sophisticated sensors in orbit with sensors on the ground and in the air to create a "Hyperspectral Remote Sensor" (HRS). It can give advance warnings about water contamination after a forest fire, alert authorities of a pollution spill long before a ...

According to climate change experts, our planet has a fever — melting glaciers are just one stark sign of the radical changes we can expect. But global warming`s effects on farming and water resources is still a mystery. A new Tel Aviv University invention, a real-time "Optical Soil Dipstick" (OSD), may help solve the mystery and provide a new diagnostic tool for assessing the heal...

The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth more than 2 billion years ago. Called banded iron formations or BIFs, these ancient rocks formed between 3.8 and 1.7 billion years ago at what was then the bottom of the ocean. The stripes represent alternatin...

Using updated information, NASA scientists have recalculated the path of a large asteroid. The refined path indicates a significantly reduced likelihood of a hazardous encounter with Earth in 2036. The Apophis asteroid is approximately the size of two-and-a-half football fields. The new data were documented by near-Earth object scientists Steve Chesley and Paul Chodas at NASA`s Jet Propulsion Labo...

Challenging conventional wisdom, new research finds that the number of sunspots provides an incomplete measure of changes in the Sun`s impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle. The study, led by scientists at the High Altitude Observatory of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Michigan, finds that Earth was bombarded last year with high level...

German scientists investigating the complex chemical mixture thought to be present in the early Earth’s oceans have found that amino acids can be ‘cooked’ into many other important chemical building blocks of life when embedded in salt crusts. Results of the laboratory experiments will be presented by Dr Stefan Fox at the European Planetary Science Congress in Potsdam, Germany, o...

A discovery about the moon made in the 1960s is helping researchers unlock secrets about Earth`s oceans today. By applying a method of calculating gravity that was first developed for the moon to data from NASA`s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, JPL researchers have found a way to measure the pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Just as knowing atmospheric pressure allows m...