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Once upon a time, a stone the size of Connecticut exploded in the atmosphere, showering Globe with bits of debris so numerous that they've skewed our expectation of what the solar organisation was like back then. Finding meteorites older than this would resolve the problem, but the Earth's surface is so riddled with $.25 of droppings from this one explosion, scientists have described trying to find meteorites from anywhere else every bit "like finding a needle in a haystack."

asteroid

And so how practice you find a needle in a haystack? Y'all tin spend some hours sifting through it piece by piece. Or, you can fire the haystack. Cosmochemist Philipp Heck dissolved a rock in stiff acid to liberate the tiny, crystalline $.25 of aboriginal asteroid within. They're from earlier the big droppings shower, which ways that their chemic composition stands to explain why the meteorites on Earth aren't made of quite the same stuff as the asteroid belt.

My favorite decorated bees at NASA have been hard at work, as per usual. They've been collaborating with the ESA to utilise the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the expansion of the Universe. Their results are… mixed. On the one hand, the rate they got for the expansion of the local Universe is consequent with prior art. On the other, the charge per unit they measured for the expansion of the early Universe doesn't match what other scientists have seen. This points to a contraction in our understanding of the cosmos.

NASA also sent up a satellite dorsum in November, called GOES-16. It's just turned in a bumper crop of new satellite images, which you tin cheque out hither:

The next fourth dimension SpaceX sends a disposable rocket up, which will be a Falcon 9 now scheduled to launch an EchoStar satellite into orbit on 3 February, it should exist the last dispensable rocket they launch. Time to come big-payload launches will fly on either the higher-functioning Falcon ix (Block 5) or Falcon Heavy. SpaceX besides has a launch scheduled for the middle of February, headed on a commercial resupply flight to the International Space Station.

Which is a pretty hot belongings correct now, by the fashion. Some folks from a private space firm want to repurpose parts of the ISS that are no longer necessary. NASA hasn't even agreed nonetheless, and it sure would be a major effort to retrieve and refurb parts. But that's still probably better than random debris deorbiting over land.