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Stories about: impact


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Number of Data Breaches Doubled in 2010 but Impact Was Much Lower

Data protection solutions provider Imperva reports that the number of data breach incidents recorded in U.S. this year has nearly doubled compared to 2009, but the volume of exposed records has registered a huge drop.For its analysis, Imperva used data from Privacy Clearinhouse (PRC), a nonprofit organization that tr...

4 December 2010
06:03 GMT

Santa Fe Was Impacted by Huge Asteroid

Between 1.2 billion and 330 million years ago, the area near Santa Fe, New Mexico, was the site of a major asteroid impact. The conclusion belongs to a new study, which looked at an exposed mountain wall. The feature exposes a number of rock layers that look all the same to the eye of profane individuals, but which p...

9 August 2010
10:10 GMT

2182 – Year of Possible Asteroid Collision

Spanish researchers have concluded that the potentially hazardous asteroid '(101955) 1999 RQ36' has 1/1000 chance of hitting our planet, more likely during the year 2182. This research also involved researchers from the University of Pisa (Italy), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA) and INAF-IASF-Rome (Ital...

27 July 2010
08:53 GMT

Old Hypothesis on How the Moon Formed Gains Support

The Giant Impact Hypothesis (GIH) is the main theory we have at this point about how the Moon formed. It is generally agreed upon by astronomers and planetary scientists, although alternative explanations about how our faithful companion appeared have been set forth over the years. At this point, a new idea is gainin...

27 January 2010
16:01 GMT

Atlantic Depression May Be an Impact Crater

While conducting a scientific study South of the Azores Islands, scientists at the EMEPC (Task Group for the Extension of the Portuguese Continental Shelf) discovered an underwater structure at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean that looked very much like an impact crater. The Fried Egg, as the formation was called, mi...

18 December 2009
06:51 GMT

Rogue Object Impacts Jupiter

Exactly 15 years after Jupiter ripped apart and destroyed the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, astronomers have discovered a new dark spot on the surface of the planet, which is comparable to the ones left behind by the former comet, when it slammed into the Jovian atmosphere. NASA made the find with the Jet Propulsion Lab�...

21 July 2009
01:52 GMT

German Boy Gets Hit by Meteorite Traveling 30,000MpH

German teenager Gerrit Blank, 14, may consider himself lucky, after being hit in the arm by a falling meteorite. Traveling at more than 30,000 miles per hour, the incandescent, red-hot piece of rock, no larger than the size of a pea, soared extremely close to the boy, rubbing against his hand, and then burying itself...

12 June 2009
18:01 GMT

New Asteroid-Deflecting Method Devised

North Carolina State University (NCSU) doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering David French is the person the entire planet will be indebted to in the event that an asteroid makes its way on a collision course with Earth. The expert has devised a new way of ensuring that asteroids that could destroy all life on o...

17 April 2009
06:09 GMT

Asteroid Could Hit Earth in 160 Years

Astronomers in Italy have determined that our society could be at risk of getting seriously damaged by a potential impact between our planet and an asteroid. Such a collision could take place in approximately 160 years, between 2169 and 2199, and the main suspect is an asteroid known as 1999 RQ36. It posed no dan...

9 February 2009
07:04 GMT

The Dark Side of the Moon Used to Face Us

The Moon might have, at some point, been facing us with its “dark side,” a new astronomical theory points out. French researchers at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics have analyzed the disposition of dozens of crater on the lunar surface, and have concluded that the oldest ones are simply not positione...

22 January 2009
03:37 GMT

Mercury and Mars Were Part of the Same Ring

According to a new theory, Mars and Mercury could have been part of the same rocky ring around the Sun, in the early days of the solar system. In its earliest form, the distribution of our planets in the system may have looked completely different, and some say that the orbiting ring around the Sun was the birth plac...

20 January 2009
02:43 GMT

Asteroids Also Give Life, Not Only End It

Modern vision perceives asteroids more as a threat than as anything else. Plans are being made to track the movements of near-Earth objects, to detect those that may be on collision courses with our planet and to intercept those that might prove hazardous. But it hasn't always been so, shows a recent experiment,...

9 December 2008
03:57 GMT

Dealing with Meteor Threats

Most certainly, when the topic of destroying potentially hazardous asteroids that could reach a collision course with the Earth comes into question, almost everybody thinks of the 1998 movie "Armageddon," in which Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck saved the planet from one. Or at least Phil Plait's recent book, "Deat...

4 December 2008
06:38 GMT

Pan-STARRS Has a 1.4 Gigapixel Resolution

Technology is steadily evolving, devices and gadgets become increasingly smaller and optical resolution gets ever larger. Regular photo cameras now boast impressive 5 megapixel resolution and fantastic zoom-in abilities. Well, impressive until some while ago, that is. Still, in this accelerating age of minimizing si...

1 December 2008
10:01 GMT

Life Is Also Due to Lack of Comet Impacts

Possibly, Drake's equation should also take into account the factor of comet activity in the environment of the planets that could actually support life. New statistics suggest that our own solar system is far more spared by such cosmic catastrophes than the similar nearby ones, so we own our very existence, to ...

1 December 2008
04:55 GMT

Aerial Technique Helps Reveal Old Canadian Crater

It was about the year 900 AD when a large, tree log-sized meteor smashed on the surface of the Earth in a western region of Canada, leaving a large scar as an amphitheater-shaped crater. It still lies there today, filled with small meteorite pieces, under a thick blanket of trees, as a research indicates. The meteori...

29 November 2008
17:51 GMT

Asteroid Threat Response Plan Needed

Rusty Schweickart, a former U.S. Astronaut, is leading a campaign that aims to convince the United Nations to pay serious attention and dedicate proper resources to the development of an accurate plan of detecting and dealing with potentially hazardous asteroids close to the Earth. In his opinion, the measures would ...

26 November 2008
05:39 GMT

New Insight on Mars' Magnetic Field

As some of you may know, the idea of ancient asteroids smashing off on the Martian surface and shutting down most of the planet's magnetic field is not new, and we've already written about it in a previous article. But a recent study provides more insight on how this may have happened, aided by new data obt...

21 November 2008
03:58 GMT

Ancient Asteroid Provoked New York Tsunami

A group of scientists from the Harvard University led by Katherine Cagen claims that a massive tsunami wave splashed ashore some 2,300 years ago, mightily sweeping the coastal regions of New York deeply inland. Even more, the researchers indicate it is most likely that the catastrophe was caused by an ancient asteroi...

21 November 2008
03:12 GMT

Moon's Volcanic Activity Longer Than Previously Believed

Images recently sent from the Japanese Moon orbiter KAGUYA (Japanese for “SELENE”) show that the volcanic activity on the far side of Earth's natural satellite may have ended later than scientists previously thought. Latest estimations appreciate that the last such activity occurred in the region ab...

7 November 2008
06:00 GMT

Mars' Scars Are Remnants from Impact with Third Moon

About a billion years ago, there was a pair of small moons revolving each other in close orbit with Mars. One of them, Phobos, is still performing its regular cyclic patrols around the red planet, but the other, as experts believe, has broken into pieces, entered the atmosphere, and eventually smashed on Mars' ...

27 October 2008
01:32 GMT

Collision Crater Uncovered by Erosion on Mars

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured amazing new images that show an odd feature on the northern pole of the planet. It seems to be an impact crater, which was revealed as the terrain in the region slowly eroded.The characteristics of the red planet all indicate evidence of a violent past, like the fa...

17 October 2008
11:08 GMT

Meteor Threat Larger Than Terrorist Threat

Valid mathematical calculations based on accurate historical and present facts observations result in a theory that assumes it's more likely to die in a terrorist attack than being blown off by the impact of a meteorite's collision with the Earth. This sort of makes one ponder on the way money is spent in o...

15 October 2008
05:17 GMT

Warm Dust Particles Suggest Planetary Collision

By observing vast masses of dust accompanying a distant binary star system, US scientists concluded that it's possible that 2 planets similar to Earth violently collided 300 million light years away from us.  Benjamin Zuckerman, an astronomer at the University of California in Los Angeles, who worked on the...

22 September 2008
05:56 GMT

Mars Had Significant Amounts of Liquid Water on the Surface

Mars had liquid water on the surface in its distant past and quite a lot of it too, according to the high-resolution spectrometry images relayed back to Earth by the CRISM instrument on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. CRISM revealed that there is a great abundance of clay minerals, which usually form i...

17 July 2008
05:10 GMT

Binary Asteroid to Pass by Earth

Yet another reminder of the dangers to which the Earth is subjected every day has been brought to our attention by the Arecibo Radio Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's LINEAR search program which discovered earlier this year an asteroid expected to make a fly-by around Earth sometime tod...

14 July 2008
02:38 GMT

Water Discovered on the Moon

Soil samples returned from the Moon during the Apollo missions were for the first time proven to contain trace amounts of water, although they cannot indicate how much water is currently present there nor can they be used to predict a method through which water could be extracted in the near future. The long expected...

10 July 2008
03:18 GMT

Space Rocks Could Re-Colonize Earth

Asteroid and comet collisions usually bring havoc to Earth, often provoking mass extinctions, but they can also seed life. In fact, we're most likely the product of such an event that took place several hundred million years ago. The last large impact that occurred is dated about 65 million years in the past and...

15 May 2008
10:02 GMT

UK's Biggest Meteorite Impact Discovered

According to researchers from the Oxford and Aberdeen universities, about 1.2 billion years ago, a relatively large object entered Earth's atmosphere and fell towards the regions of north-west Scotland, to create the biggest meteorite impact on the territories of the United Kingdom. The exact location of the cra...

26 March 2008
07:49 GMT

Mysteries of the Peruvian Meteorite

You might not know this, but in September 2007 a meteorite entered the Earth's atmosphere and eventually reached the ground in a countryside area in Peru, where it formed a small crater, right in front of the eyes of the people living nearby. And this occurred although most of the space rocks hitting our planet ...

12 March 2008
03:49 GMT

The Search for Elusive Meteorite Begins Now!

On the evening of March 5, Wednesday, the Physics and Astronomy Department at Western Ontario University received a number of calls and e-mails from people claiming to have been a bright streak of light crossing the sky sometime around 10:59 p.m. EST. Luckily, the astronomy department is equipped with a network of al...

8 March 2008
03:36 GMT

Saturn's Moon Rhea May Have Rings, Cassini Suggests

The Saturn system is well known for its unique configuration. Being the second largest planet in the solar system, Saturn distinguishes itself from the other gas giants through a large ring of debris orbiting around it and the large number of moons - over 60 moons. Now Cassini promises to add yet another unique featu...

7 March 2008
02:45 GMT

Tag an Asteroid and Win 50,000 Bucks!

A pretty small prize, one would say, especially considering the implications of a large asteroid hitting the Earth in the near future. We may at least stay calm until the day of 13. April 2036, that is. This is the date when the largest asteroid orbiting through the close vicinity of the Earth may execute a fly-by ar...

27 February 2008
07:01 GMT

More Asteroids Coming Our Way!

All of a sudden, it started raining with asteroids! No wonder, astronomers estimate that there are about 7,000 such rocks, discovered and undiscovered, orbiting around the Sun and periodically coming through the vicinity of the Earth. Because they are so small in size, many less than 150 meters in diameter, astronome...

25 January 2008
02:49 GMT

Doomsday Asteroid Will Miss Mars

After nearly two months of observations on the trajectory of asteroid 2007 WD5, astronomers finally succeeded in calculating the exact trajectory of the object which only a few days ago had a chance of 1 in 28 to hit the Red Planet. Asteroid 2007 WD5, discovered on November 30 last year, is now expected to pass thro...

9 January 2008
02:34 GMT

Asteroid Has 1 in 75 Odds to Hit Mars

If an asteroid hits the Red Planet, it could be the second time in history when humanity witnesses a collision between a celestial body and a planet in the solar system, other than the Earth, since the event in 2004 when the broken comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 intersected the orbit of Jupiter, creating giant fireballs in i...

21 December 2007
02:29 GMT

Hundreds of People in Hospital - Consequence of a Possible Meteor Impact

No one is sure yet if it really was a meteorite, but hundreds of Peruvians have required treatment after Saturday night, an object from space crashed on Earth, in a remote area, leaving a deep crater near the town of Carancas (Andes), in the Puno area (south Peru, near the Bolivian border), some 1,300km (800 mi) sout...

19 September 2007
05:31 GMT

How to Fight an Asteroid Hitting the Earth? The Moon - Noah's Ark

We have barely escaped from an Armageddon. Next time we may not be that lucky. That's why some see the moon as our possible escape in case such a scenario happens. NASA is already planning a permanent lunar outpost by 2024. "But that plan should be expanded to include a way to preserve humanity's learning, ...

15 August 2007
03:57 GMT

Could the Next Mass Extinction Be Close?

At least five mass extinctions may have occurred in the history of our planet, meaning that in a relatively short period of time, a large number of species have disappeared. Probably the most famous one took place 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaur domination reached its end....

28 July 2007
07:01 GMT

Could This Comet Hit Earth in the Next Millennium?

This comet is one of the few that really spawned some controversy regarding the possibility of a collision with Earth and was even classified as having "a non-zero possibility of impact." This means it could hit our planet or the Moon, sometime around 3044, or at least that is what astronomers thought about four dec...

17 July 2007
06:31 GMT

Meteorite Debris Found by Accident in What Was Once a Giant Crater

From time to time, scientists get a little bit of help from Lady Luck and when this happens, they discover something amazing. This is exactly what happened after a forest fire more than 450 miles away at Sudbury, Ontario.A group of geologists were forced to find alternative routes for their field trip, since the fir...

16 July 2007
10:20 GMT

Top 10 Countries Most at Risk of Asteroid Impact

Scientists performed a new study to evaluate what countries are most at risk of what they call "small" asteroid impact. The term small must not be taken literally, since a 1-kilometer-wide asteroid may not be large in astronomical terms, but it still can produce a disaster.Using a new computer software, called NEOim...

10 July 2007
02:48 GMT

Astronomers Solve the Mystery of Giant Space Sponge Orbiting Saturn

Hyperion, a satellite of Saturn, is one of the strangest moons in our solar system, whose behavior and composition has puzzled astronomers for many years. This moon really looks like a giant cosmic sponge, but there are many more weird properties that have just recently been explained.A highly irregular body in the ...

5 July 2007
03:34 GMT

The Moon Didn't Form the Way We Think!

Presently, the widely accepted theory about the formation process of the Moon is a giant impact between the early Earth and a celestial body the size of Mars, that threw out enough material in orbit that accreted in time to form our only natural satellite.However this hypothesis is not accepted by all the scientific...

28 June 2007
04:16 GMT

How Powerful Is a Boxing Champion's Fist? It's Like Being Hit By a Horse at Full Speed

The impact force has the greatest effect when it's applied over a short time period and it is equal to the mass of the hitting object times the acceleration. This means that a stone weighing one kilogram (2.2 pounds) moving at 50 m/s (1600 ft/s) will have the same impact force as a 10 grams rock moving at 500 ...

26 June 2007
05:50 GMT

Meteorite Struck the International Space Station!

This week, two Russian cosmonauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) walked out into space and climbed on the station to install deflector shields, in fact protective panels designed to shield the orbiting station from dangerous space debris and small meteorites. During this spacewalk, the two astronauts...

7 June 2007
08:55 GMT

Newly Discovered Blue Landslides on Mars

New images of a recent landslide in the Martian crater Zunil show astonishing blue streaks on the walls. This image was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars reconnaissance orbiter. There's a catch, though. This is a false color picture and its purpose i...

6 June 2007
16:16 GMT

NASA Can Only Anticipate 5% of Potential Asteroid Impacts on Earth

NASA's internal procedure for tracking potentially dangerous asteroids that could hit Earth and for countermeasures designed to deflect the space objects is deeply flawed and heavily criticized because it exaggerates the cost and difficulty of the program.The agency had one year to prepare plans for a survey th...

22 May 2007
12:06 GMT

Ancient Comet Exploded Over Earth, Nearly Wiped Out Life In Northern Hemisphere

A group of scientists discovered new compelling evidence of a cataclysmic event that took place 13,000 years ago on Earth. A large comet exploded over the Earth and created a hail of fireballs that set most of the Northern Hemisphere on fire.After analyzing 26 different sites in Europe and North America, they found ...

21 May 2007
08:42 GMT

Huge Asteroid Missed Earth, Another One in 2029 May Not !

The space rock, dubbed 2006 VV2, came within 2.1million miles of hitting us - which is a near miss in space terms, even though that's about nine times farther away than the moon.The asteroid was flying past Earth on Friday night, at 11 p.m. (PDT), and on Saturday 7 a.m. GMT for Europe.There was no danger of col...

2 April 2007
03:35 GMT


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