Now, researchers speculate that it is the first known meteorite from our Solar System's innermost planet, Mercury.
Either that or, if the tweaking is in the wrong direction, it gets ejected from the solar system altogether.
In that case, he calculates, the chance of life having crossed to the earth from another solar system, or vice versa, is about 1%.
An even more intriguing question and the one that the original theory of panspermia tried to address is whether life might have arrived on earth from another solar system.
Moreover, Vesta may have survived intact from the solar system's origin, despite having been pummeled by impacts so violent that they sprayed the solar system with buckshot blasts of debris.
Dr Adams has found that there is one chance in 100, 000 that this would cause the earth to be ejected from the solar system before the sun becomes a red giant.
And new software, plus the ability to vary the projected sizes and brightnesses of planets and moons, makes it possible to simulate the sky from anywhere in the solar system: to see earthrise from Mars, for example, or to watch Jupiter's moons rise and set from a vantage point just above the gas giant's cloud-tops.
Cheng says the comet is likely making its first visit to the inner solar system from the Oort cloud, a reservoir of hundreds of millions of comets encircling our solar system at a distance of about a light year.
FORBES: Budgets Nudge NASA Toward Balloon-Based Planetary Science: First Target? Comet ISON
As a result, a system using wind and solar has to be built with sufficient system capacity from conventional sources to be handle the system full load without the wind and solar systems.
FORBES: Why Shale Gas is Closing Coal Plants: So Why Do the Hippies Hate Shale?
"Each meteorite is a time capsule and space probe recording the history of our solar system from 4.5 billion years ago, " said Caroline Smith, curator of meteorites at London's Natural History Museum.
Asteroid 99942 Apophis is a primordial relic from the formation of our Solar System.
"I'm interested in where all the bits that made up the Solar System came from, " she said.
Evidence that the sun was once part of a brood comes from the rubble leftover from the formation of the solar system.
The perceived problem is that for the first 600m years of its existence, the planet was being bombarded by bits of debris left over from the formation of the solar system.
Laser technology is used in CDs that have made albums obsolete, and now it holds the promise of bringing live, high-definition video feeds from far reaches of the solar system, including Jupiter, NASA said.
Another is that they have been confirmed time and again by tests that range from minute measurements of bodies circling the solar system to observations of the farthest known light sources, quasars, billions of light years from Earth.
The 1.8m (60-inch) diameter telescope on Haleakala will also spot many small, faint bodies in the outer Solar System that hid from previous surveys.
BBC: Pan-Starrs telescope begins operations to hunt asteroids
It describes a life form that inhabits a small nebula known as a Bok globule, which visits the solar system to refuel from the sun.
Comets, which originate from the outer reaches of the solar system, are faster moving and harder to track than asteroids, but carry just as much potential for catastrophe.
Asteroids and meteorites, along with comets, are regarded as left-overs from the raw ingredients of the early solar system, uncooked by any planet-forming processes.
By using lasers, NASA is now on the verge of revolutionizing and speeding up delivery of data now dispatched from outer space and all around the solar system, the agency said.
Right now there's a flux of stuff from other stars from our galaxy that's flying into the solar system.
Apart from his obvious gifts, Superman's capacity for continual rebooting has kept him fresh from generation to generation: from leaping tall buildings in 1938 to traversing the solar system and even traveling through time in the 1960s and '70s, to surviving both death and matrimony in more recent decades.
The first, called Kepler-34b, orbits its two small stars in a solar system about 4, 900 light years from Earth.
Even the shuttle will live on, in some sense, since the Space Launch System the unromantic name of the beefy rocket needed to loft astronauts and cargoes into high orbits or farther into the solar system will be built partly from recycled shuttle parts in an effort to save money and use familiar technology.
This causes charged particles that initially came from the Sun to speed up and head out of our solar system.
FORBES: Voyager 1 Flies Through 'Magnetic Highway' On Its Way Out Of The Solar System
The Sun's magnetic field and solar wind - mainly in the form of electrons and protons coming out of the Sun - protects the entire Solar System by acting as a sort of shield from cosmic rays (very energetic particles and radiation from outer space).
This supports models where the moon is derived from Earth materials that were ejected during a giant impact event early in solar system history.
There are millions of asteroids in our solar system, and they come in all dimensions -- from the size of a beach ball to a large mountain, NASA said.
Orbital debris could block all these benefits for centuries and prevent us from developing clean energy sources like space solar power satellites, exploring our Solar System and someday making humanity a multi-planetary civilization capable of surviving true climatic catastrophes.
应用推荐