Diary Essay

Now that we can observe earth from outer space, we can find impact crater’s on the earth’s surface. The three largest craters are found in Ontario, Canada , Vredefort, South Africa and the Chicxlub crater (Carter). All three of these craters are massive and the Chicxlub crater has been hypothesized to have destroyed the dinosaurs. According to Charles S. Quoi, in order to make an impact the size of the Chicxlub crater, an asteroid would have had to have been at least six miles in diameter and hit earth at a speed of 12.4 miles per second. In comparison, the largest fragment of SL9 to hit Jupiter was slightly more than 2 miles in diameter (Koppes). To answer our question then, yes, meteorite’s have collided with earth, but will they again

“Spacecraft Will Reach Pluto in July, Revealing Last Face in Solar System” by Nadia Drake July 2015: National Geographic

Astronomers aboard NASA's planet-hunting spacecraft Kepler just discovered Earth 2.0 aka Kepler 452b. The planet is located 1,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The discovery of Kepler 452b brings the total number of confirmed planets by the Kepler project to 1030.

Astronomers at Yale and Harvard have measured the “heartbeats” of stars within elliptical galaxy M87 and used that data to determine the galaxy’s age in a new way. M87 is located 53 million light-years from Earth.

The event covered different topics, including various types of telescopes and their functions, what was found on Mars, the visualization on climate change, the book “Hidden Figures”, and “IDIC – Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations” from Star Trek.

The automated adaptive optics instrument, Robo-AO (Baranec et al. 2014), has played an integral part of the follow-up effort for the Kepler mission. Over half of the approximately 4000 Kepler planetary candidates have only been observed in high-resolution by Robo-AO, proving that it is the only currently operating instrument that can feasibly observe every TESS planetary candidate visible from the North. Robo-SOAR, a robotic NGS-AO instrument in development for the SOAR telescope (Ziegler et al. 2016), will be able to observe targets in the South. As a continuing collaborator with the Robo-AO team, I will perform the analysis of the estimated 500 rocky planets that TESS will discover (Sullivan et al. 2015). I expect this study will confirm several hundred small planets around bright stars and provide precise radius estimates for every rocky planet discovered with TESS.

The discovery of Kepler-452b “Second Earth” wasn’t easy for the astronomers . In 2009,NASA’s kepler spacecraft has been observing stars for the photometer , an instrument that uses to detect transit events , in which a planet crosses in front and dims the star host’s brief and roughly regular period of time . In this last test Kepler observed 50000 stars , including Kepler-452 ; the exploratory light curves in the Kepler science team were sent for analysis . To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the team searched for better observations at the University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory, the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, Arizona, and the W. M. Keck Observatory atop

Known as Kepler 452b, it’s the smallest exoplanet we’ve discovered existing within that coveted circular area of a G2 star colloquially called the Goldilocks zone. G2 is a category of star-luminescence that our own Sun also falls under. The new planet is about 6 billion years old, has a diameter

Brown and his partner Konstantin Batygin make the claim that, during the solar system’s early stages 4.5 billion years ago, Planet X was knocked out of the region of planets forming near the sun and was slowed down by gas before settling into a distant elliptical orbit where it currently lurks today. Though astrologists have been searching and making far-fetched claims over Planet X for centuries, Brown and Batygin’s claims are the

Every now and again there are historical moments of human triumphs, which can only be captured within that moment, to fully express the human response, by the hurried positioning and click of a camera. Such is the moment when a NASA photographer captured a picture of the News Horizon’s Science Team examining the sharpest image of Pluto before the Horizon’s spacecraft was to make an even closer approach later in the day, on July 14, 2015 (Ingalls, 2015). The image appeared on Reuters U.S. web edition, and was distributed via Twitter, with a link attached to even more images of Pluto captured over the several days preceding this image This image was captured at the .Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel,

If a meteoroid that diminutive could have such a strong impact, what of those that are within our solar system and are remarkably larger? Or could a cluster of these smaller meteoroids appearing in the form of meteor showers stand as a possible

Estimated to comprise one third of its home, the asteroid belt, Ceres is the largest object out in the asteroid belt. Ceres has a diameter of 945 km, still smaller than Pluto, which has a diameter of 2,372 km. It is made of a rocky core, icy mantle, and it has been hypothesized that Ceres has an internal ocean of liquid water underneath

thirteen years ago, but we can still see evidence of the comet's impact to this day.

Experts have calculated that an asteroid of the size that hit the Earth 65 million years can hit the Earth approximately every 100 million years. (Hartmann, n.d)

Outer space is mankind’s common heritage, so all the countries must have equal access to the outer space. In the past few decades science and technology have freed from the boundaries of earth and making its way in to space.