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"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
There's a new space telescope in the sky: Euclid. Equipped with two large panoramic cameras, Euclid captures light from the visible to the near-infrared. It took five hours of observing for Euclid's 1.2-meter diameter primary mirror to capture, through its sharp optics, the 1000+ galaxies in the Perseus cluster, which lies 250 million light years away. More than 100,000 galaxies are visible in the background, some as far away as 10 billion light years. The revolutionary nature of Euclid lies in the combination of its wide field of view (twice the area of the full moon), its high angular resolution (thanks to its 620 Megapixel camera), and its infrared vision, which captures both images and spectra. Euclid's initial surveys, covering a third of the sky and recording over 2 billion galaxies, will enable a study of how dark matter and dark energy have shaped our universe.
Why didn't we see it? An undetected asteroid zipped past the Earth undetected last month in the closest near miss yet recorded -- within a quarter of the distance to the Moon. Such a close call is actually quite common -- what was new was that we did see it, although the detection occurred hours after it happened. In fact, a rock this size strikes the Earth roughly once a year and smaller rocks strike the Earth daily. The global danger from the bus-sized space rock was minimal. Robert Cash of Minor Planet Research Inc. discovered asteroid 2003 SQ222 in data from the sky-scanning Lowell Observatory Near Earth Object Search (LONEOS). Pictured above is the discovery image sequence of SQ222, shown stretched vertically to be more easily viewable. Objects like SQ222 are hard to detect because they are so faint and move so fast. An ability to scan the sky to detect, catalog, and analyze such objects has been increasing notably in recent years.
This is what it looks like to punch an asteroid. Last month, NASA's robotic spacecraft OSIRIS-REx descended toward, thumped into, and then quickly moved away from the small near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu. The featured video depicts the Touch-And-Go (TAG) sampling event over a three-hour period. As the movie begins, the automated probe approaches the 500-meter, diamond-shaped, space rock as it rotates noticeably below. About 20 seconds into the video, Nightingale comes into view -- a touchdown area chosen to be relatively flat and devoid of large boulders that could damage the spaceship. At 34 seconds, the shadow of OSIRIS-REx's sampling arm suddenly comes into view, while very soon thereafter rocks and gravel fly from the arm's abrupt hard impact. The wily spacecraft was able to capture and successfully stow some of Bennu's ejecta for return to Earth for a detailed analysis. This long return is scheduled to start in 2021 March with arrival back on Earth in 2023 September. If the return sample does successfully reach Earth, it will be scrutinized for organic compounds that might have seeded a young Earth, rare or unusual elements and minerals, and clues about the early history of our Solar System.
Expanse