When the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa [Hi ya Boo sa] visited the near Earth asteroid Itokawa in 2005 it found this 2000 foot by 800 foot elliptical world to have a variety of surface features. Instead of being a solid object like some asteroids, Itokawa is a rubble pile of boulders and pebbles held together by it's tiny gravity. The total volume of pebbles seems to be comparable to the volume of large rocks and boulders which make up Itokawa , however, the depths of the pebbles or their concentration in the center remains unknown. Given this uncertainty, this asteroid appears to be made up of a million times more small particles than larger ones.
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868-Inside Venus
Astronomers have discovered some 1.4 million asteroids. Approximately 35,000 of these space rocks come near Earth. Less than 40 of them are classified as being Atira asteroids whose orbits lie entirely within the Earth’s orbit about the Sun. Only one of these, asteroid number 594913 named 'Ayló'chaxnim (eye-LAW-chax-nim ) has an orbit which is entirely within the orbit of the planet Venus.
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355E-383-Moon Water
The lunar roving, battery powered, 4 wheel drive "Moon Buggy" allowed astronauts on Apollo 15, 16, and 17 to travel 8 mph on the lunar surface with a maximum range of approximately 4.7 mi. Some of the rocks that these space travelers brought back, from the tiny area they were able to visit on the Moon, contained volcanic glass beads with trace amounts of trapped water inside of them.
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867-Daytime Fireball
Dr. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office reports that on June 26, 2025 shortly after noon a beachball sized meteoroid traveling at approximately 30,000 miles per hour broke up about 27 miles above the town of West Forrest, Georgia.
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354E-382-Martian Debris
Martian Trojan asteroids have stable orbits around the Sun, leading and trailing the red planet by 60 degrees, where the Sun's and Mars's gravity are balanced. For some time astronomers have considered it unlikely that these asteroids wandered in from the asteroid belt. Recently, Dr. David Polishook of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel led a group of researchers who published a paper in the journal Nature Astronomy which sets forth evidence that a group of 7 Martian Trojan Asteroids were blasted from the Martian surface when a large asteroid impacted the red planet early in the history of the solar system. The impact more than 4 billion years or so ago which blasted loose a mile diameter chunk of Mars and gave it a speed of the more than the 3 mi/s required to escape the red planet gives us an insight into the level of violence which occurred before our solar system came into it's present relatively calm state.
A real "Science Snack" for anyone who is interested in the extraterrestrial.Dr. Al Grauer is a member of the Catalina Sky Survey which has led the world in near Earth asteroid discoveries for 17 of the past 19 years.The music is "Eternity" by John Lyell.Astronomy Asteroids Space NASA Comets Earth Impact Aliens
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