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This week, Hal is looking closer and closer to space rocks of all kinds.
Have you ever touched a rock that was not from this earth? If you visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, you may have queued to touch the lunar rock they exhibited in the Great Hall. But other than that, did you hit a lunar rock? A rock of Mars? Or even an asteroid?
Perhaps.
This is because, long before life on Earth, there was a time in our solar system called the Great Bombing. At the beginning of the solar system, almost everything was regularly slammed by large chunks of rock, asteroids, etc., that were zapping. These collisions created the craters you see on the moon and other places in the solar system. And these successes were sometimes huge and dragged pieces of rock into space. These rocks floated for billions of years and, from time to time, some of them ran on the Earth and became meteors. And some of these the rocks surfaced on the surface to become meteorites. So, you can find a bit of, say, the moon, stuck to the rocks of the Earth. In fact, I have a little moon myself.
The asteroid Vesta, the size of Iowa, occupies an important place in the Colorado skies. It's worth watching. And we have a spaceship called Dawn, which spent a year orbiting Vesta, analyzing its surface. And from this analysis, we now know that there are fragments of Vesta on Earth! I've seen one recently at a rock and gem show in Denver.
If you want to take a closer look at Vesta, or any other wonderful and amazing thing in the sky, visit csastro.org for a link to information about our monthly meetings and our free public nights.
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