Image: NASA
An international exercise to simulate an asteroid striking Earth has come to an end. With just six days to go before a fictitious impact, things don’t look good for a 185-mile-wide region between Prague and Munich.
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Two years ago, the organizers of this event accidentally destroyed New York City, and now it’s time for a border region intersecting Germany, Austria, and Czech Republic to meet the same fate. When I covered the early days of this week’s simulation on Wednesday, the gathered experts were weighing their options as a 460-foot-wide asteroid barreled toward Central Europe.
Going interstellar with a sun-skirting probe
APL s Interstellar Probe will slingshot around the sun to explore the outer reaches of the universe By Adam Hadhazy / Published Spring 2021
How s this for a paradox: In order to go farther from the sun than we ve ever gone before, first we must go
closer to the sun than ever before. That s the counterintuitive concept at the heart of the Interstellar Probe mission in development at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in collaboration with NASA. The mission s primary goal is to explore the far-off region where our sun s influence wanes and interstellar space begins. Yet to get there in any reasonable span of time say 20 years the probe must reach a blistering speed, upward of 200,000 miles per hour or about five times faster than any previous spacecraft.
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A graphic representation of the heliosphere, a vast bubble-like structure defining the extent of the solar wind and the Sun’s electromagnetic influence on the local environment. The heliosphere is distorted by the solar system’s motion through the interstellar medium. A proposed Interstellar Probe would venture much farther into interstellar space than either of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A proposed NASA mission to send a probe outside the solar system to study the Sun’s interstellar environment and the heliosphere, the vast bubble-like region marking the extent of the solar wind, is gaining momentum at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.
NASA Reveals Details Of Its Proposed Interstellar Probe iflscience.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from iflscience.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.