NASA’s Goldstone planetary radar system recently recorded two near-Earth asteroids, 2024 MK and 2011 UL21, flying by our planet. Perhaps a tad alarming, one was only detected 13 days before it safely bypassed Earth, but scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California assure it never posed a threat. Still, the imagery they were able to collect has been extremely informative.
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An Austrian forest ranger picked up the rock in 1976. Decades later, scientists discovered the object’s origin story while digging through old photos.
“I never thought I’d hold a piece of Mars.”
That quote could easily have been the tagline for a science fiction movie, but in this case, it’s from University of Texas at Dallas computer science junior Aarej Syed, who did, indeed, along with his classmates, hold a small piece of Mars during a spring class.
Researchers might have located the birthplace of 469219 Kamo‘oalewa, a small asteroid that has been described as Earth’s “mini-moon.” By analyzing Kamo‘oalewa’s geology and simulating different formation scenarios, they traced it back to a specific impact crater on the far side of the Moon.