Source: ksl.com
CNN — This week, a supermoon dazzled skywatchers, two asteroid missions shared their initial and surprising results and 518 million-year-old fossils were found in China.
Astronomers also witnessed a space cannonball and discovered how bombastic meteors can be when they explode in the Earth’s atmosphere.
And on Friday, NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Anne McClain performed a 6 ½-hour spacewalk to make some electrical updates on the outside of the International Space Station.
Here’s all of the space and science news you missed this week.
Until next year, supermoon
On Wednesday, the third and final supermoon of the year brightened up the night sky.
March’s full moon also happened on the same day as the spring equinox, welcoming in the season. The last time these two things happened on the same day was March 1981.
These two asteroids just became more interesting
Ryugu and Bennu are two asteroids, and they’re the subjects of two different missions to study these time capsules of the early days of our solar system’s formation. This week, early mission observations were released about both of them.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has only been orbiting the asteroid Bennu for a few months but mission scientists have already learned new details about the near-Earth asteroid that is 70 million miles away.
The greatest surprise of the mission happened only a few days in, when an unexpected observation signaled there was activity on Bennu, the researchers said.
The mission science team detected particle plumes ejecting off of the surface on January 6, followed by additional plumes over the last two months. That makes Bennu an active asteroid that is regularly ejecting material into space, which is rare. This is the first time scientists have had close-up observations of particle plumes erupting from an asteroid’s surface, the agency said.
They also found hydrated minerals are abundant on Bennu and they believe it’s now somewhere between 100 million and1 billion years old — much older than expected. Unfortunately, they also discovered that the asteroid is covered in large boulders, which will make a sample collection more tricky than previously believed.
Meanwhile, Japan’s Hayabusa 2 space mission has been conducting similar observations of near-Earth asteroid Ryugu. It will also return a sample from the asteroid.
Both Bennu and Ryugu are extremely dark, spinning top-shaped asteroids that are covered in large boulders, but the latest findings show that Ryugu is a lot drier.
The finding is significant because all of Earth’s water…
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