Latest Erik Asphaug Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Planetary scientists claim in a paper published in Icarus that Saturn's moons may have formed due to giant impacts. Erik Asphaug, professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), presented the new model at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Asphaug and co-author Andreas Reufer of the University of Bern found that...

  As early as Sept. 8th, NASA's GRAIL mission will blast off to uncover some of the mysteries beneath the surface of the Moon. That cratered gray exterior hides some tantalizing things – even, perhaps, a long-lost companion. If a paper published recently in the journal Nature* is right, two moons once graced our night skies. The proposition has not been proven, but has drawn widespread attention. "It's an intriguing idea," says David Smith, GRAIL's deputy principal investigator at...

Astronomers say that the Earth may have once had two moons, until the current moon devoured the other. A new study by planetary scientists at the University of California - Santa Cruz said that the far side of the moon, known as the lunar farside highlands, may be the remains of a collision with a similar companion moon. The near side of the moon is low and flat, while the far side is mountainous with a thicker crust.  The new study suggests that Earth's once second moon eventually fell...

The dramatic differences between the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars have puzzled scientists for 30 years. One of the proposed explanations--a massive asteroid impact--now has strong support from computer simulations carried out by two groups of researchers. Planetary scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, were involved in both studies, which appear in the June 26 issue of Nature."It's a very old idea, but nobody had done the numerical calculations to see what...

Hit-and-run collisions between embryonic planets during a critical period in the early history of the Solar System may account for some previously unexplained properties of planets, asteroids, and meteorites, according to researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who describe their findings in a paper to appear in the January 12 issue of the journal Nature. The four "terrestrial" or rocky planets (Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury) are the products of an initial period,...