Latest 4 Vesta Stories

NASA Within NASA’s new FY2014 budget proposal lies a project known as the Asteroid Retrieval and Utilization Mission. This project would be the first to capture a small near-Earth asteroid and safely redirect it to a lunar orbit so that astronauts can visit and explore it. Such a mission would expand scientific knowledge of the origins of both humanity and the universe. The goal of asteroid retrieval is not a new endeavor for NASA. In fact, the idea dates to the earliest days of the...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A stone originally discovered last year in Southern Morocco has been identified as a rare type of meteorite known as an achondrite, though its exact origin remains a mystery, according to experts from Washington University of St. Louis (WUSTL). The stone was one of 35 green-colored pieces discovered in early 2012. It was purchased by a dealer in the town of Erfound and then later resold to a German meteorite collector known as...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists from NASA’s Lunar Science Institute (NLSI), along with researchers from abroad, have discovered that Earth’s own natural satellite shares a striking similarity with Vesta, and perhaps other large asteroids roaming around the Solar System. The Moffett Field, California-based NLSI found that the same population of high-speed projectiles that bombarded the Moon four billion years ago, also impacted the giant asteroid...

Peter Suciu for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Understanding past collisions between celestial bodies, including asteroids, could help researchers better understand the origins of our Solar System. After all, it was through a series of such collisions some four and a half billion years ago that our planetary system was formed. What started as a giant dusty gas cloud combined to form increasingly large clumps, and as these collided and combined, they grew into what we now know to...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online NASA will be launching a new mission in 2016 to help estimate what kind of impact an asteroid would make if it struck Earth. The OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, and Regolith Explorer) mission will travel to a potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA), and make measurements of the Yarkovsky effect. This effect is a push on an asteroid that happens when it is warmed up by the sun and then...

ATLANTA, Feb. 5, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --Telcel, the leading mobile company in Mexico, has launched Recarga Amigo, an Android handset application that allows prepaid customers to make fast, on-the-go recharges 24x7x365. Powered by Vesta, a leader in electronic payments, the new app can be downloaded for free in the Google Play Store at http://tinyurl.com/axfbl8a. Like Telcel's Mi Telcel web recharge service, the app is rich with convenient features including the ability for a...

LEXINGTON, Mass., Jan. 23, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Utility costs represent the single largest controllable expense in a multi-family housing community, consuming 25 to 35% of most operating budgets[1]. New boilers and lighting retrofits help reduce consumption, but they don't tackle the estimated 20% of utility costs[2] caused by human behaviors. Now residential property managers have a new ally in the fight to stop energy waste: the SEE The Light Property Manager's Energy Toolkit....

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory A new study of images from NASA's Dawn mission examines remarkable, dark-as-coal material that speckles the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta. Scientists are using the images, taken by Dawn's framing camera, to understand the impact environment early in Vesta's evolution. In the most comprehensive analysis of the dark material to date, Dawn scientists describe how this carbon-rich material tends to appear around the edges of two giant impact basins in...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online In 2007, NASA launched the Dawn Mission to study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres. Carrying a visible camera, a visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, and a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, Dawn set out on an 8 year mission to gather a wealth of data from these two celestial bodies. Dawn arrived at the first stop in its journey, the asteroid Vesta, in June 2011 and recently departed for Ceres this September....

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA's Dawn spacecraft has revealed data that shows protoplanet Vesta is continually stirring its outermost layer. The data shows that a common form of weathering that affects many airless bodies like Vesta in the inner solar system helps to keep them looking younger by not aging the outermost layer. Findings described in an upcoming issue of the journal Nature show that data indicates that carbon-rich asteroids have been...