Asteroid Lutetia could lead to discovery of a new world.

European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft Rosetta has captured has captured the so called first close-up images of Asteroid Lutetia on this Saturday ie, 10th July.

The image is spectacular and it shows that the asteroid Lutetia has suffered many impacts as it is 4.5 billion old and the images reveal that it is heavily cratered and it is 75 miles long.



Scientists are taking these pics of Asteroid as "discovery of a new world"!

Could Asteroid Lutetia lead to a "discovery of a new world" only time will say.

Enjoy the video of Asteroid Lutetia flyby :

Did life need asteroid bombardment?

A period 3.9 billion years ago when Earth was peppered with impacts by large asteroids may have created an environment in which primitive life could take hold, rather than destroying that life. This is the bold new claim by astrobiologists at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.

What we know today as the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB) hit all the inner planets around 700 million years after the Solar System formed. The Moon and Mercury still bear the scars from this frightful time when fire and rock rained down from the heavens on a regular basis. Nobody is sure what caused the LHB, but the outward migration of the giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn may have been enough to disturb the orbits of various comets and asteroids, slinging them in our direction.

Solar wind tans young asteroids

Unlike human skin which is damaged by prolonged exposure to sunlight over a lifetime, an asteroid's surface is aged in the first instances of its life.

Of course, the time scales of the exposure are much different: for an asteroid the damage is done over a period of one million years, but this is still a very short timeframe compared with the 4.6 billion year age of the Solar System itself.

New observations conducted using ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla and the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, astronomers have shed some light on this mystery. The astronomers looked at freshly exposed asteroid surfaces (caused by the collision of two asteroids) and noticed that they change colour in less than a million years.

The charged, fast moving particles in the solar wind damage the asteroid's surface at an amazing rate.The solar wind contains highly energetic particles that bombard the exposed surfaces of asteroids, eroding the molecules and crystals on the surface and rearranging them into different configurations with distinct colours and properties.

Gravity wave mission to help study asteroids

LISA, NASA and ESA’s Laser interferometer Space Antenna, which will attempt to detect gravitational waves, will also turn its “noise” into useful information about near-Earth asteroids.
Gravity waves are associated with the warping of the space-time continuum, believed to be caused by supernovae events or colliding black holes sending ripples through the Universe. These ripples are what LISA is hoping to detect. The mission will comprise three satellites connected by laser beams, and if a gravitational wave passes them by, their separation should change by a distance less than the width of an atom.
Planetary scientists also realised that they too could exploit LISA, since asteroids would also make the spacecraft wobble, leaving a distinct signature in the data being collected. Pasquale Tricarico of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, developed this idea to predict the number of asteroid encounters LISA can expect and how those encounters can be used to determine the mass of passing asteroids.

Mass may seem like an obvious vital statistic to know about a planetary body, but Tricarico reveals that only the mass of asteroids that have been visited by spacecraft or the mass of a few binary asteroids observed from Earth are known.