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Asteroid warning system ATLAS unveiled — With some caveats. Sydney - A new warning system designed to track incoming space rocks and comets called ATLAS will be able to assess probable impact sites and issue timely warnings. The University of Hawaii, proponent of the system, says ATLAS will be up and running in 2015. The Guardian: Astronomer Professor John Tonry, of Hawaii University, said Atlas – which is scheduled to begin operations in 2015 – would have an extremely high sensitivity, which he compared to the detection of a match flame in New York when viewed from San Francisco. He said Atlas would give a one-week warning for a small asteroid – which he called "a city killer" – and three weeks for a larger "county killer". Tonry added: "That is enough time to evacuate the area, take measures to protect buildings and other infrastructure, and be alert to a tsunami danger generated by ocean impacts.

" Read more... There are obvious values in a system of this kind. Unknown- Not attributed to an original source. Meteorite Hunter Discovers New Mineral | Wired Science. Hidden within a rock from space is a mineral previously unknown to science: panguite. The new mineral was found embedded in the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969. Since 2007, geologist Chi Ma of Caltech has been probing the meteorite with a scanning electron microscope, discovering nine new materials, including panguite.

Ma and his team have determined that panguite was one of the first solid materials to coalesce in our solar system, roughly 4.567 billion years ago. The mineral’s name is a reference to Pan Gu, a primitive, hairy giant from Chinese mythology who separated yin and yang with a swing of his enormous axe, thereby creating the Earth and sky. Panguite’s primordial nature means that it was actually around before the Earth and other planets formed, meaning it can help scientists learn more about the conditions in the cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to our solar system. Image: Chi Ma/Caltech.

Blog Entry: Negative Radiation Pressure in Light Could Make Some Tractor Beams Real. Martian meteorite touches down at the University of Glasgow. AFTER hundreds of thousands of years drifting in space, a piece of the rocky surface of Mars has made its way into the hands of scientists at the University of Glasgow. Researchers based at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC) in East Kilbride have taken delivery of a 0.2-gram fragment of a Martian meteorite which fell to Earth in Morocco last year. They will use cutting-edge mass spectrometer technology to help determine how long it spent in space.

Meteorites are space rock which has fallen to Earth The meteorite, named ‘Tissint’ after the area of Morocco where it landed, is one of just 61 Martian meteorites to have been found on Earth. They were blasted from the face of Mars many thousands of years ago by impacts of several massive asteroids, and travelled through space before crashing down on our planet. Tissint was acquired by the Natural History Museum, London, in February and small pieces of it are being allocated to universities across the UK.