The Daily Nerd (May 6th, 2014)

The Daily Nerd (May 6th, 2014) #

Echoes of Chelyabinsk: Another Fireball Explodes Over Russia

Why does Russia seem to get so many bright meteors? Well at 6.6 million square miles it’s by far the largest country in the world plus, with dashboard-mounted cameras being so commonplace (partly to help combat insurance fraud) statistically it just makes sense that Russians would end up seeing more meteors, and then be able to share the experience with the rest of the world!

Pingpong! How You Could Send Something Small High In The Atmosphere

Spring is a time of treasures in eggs — think about the Easter weekend that just passed, for example, or the number of chicks hatching in farms across the world. That’s also true of “near-space” exploration. A project called PongSats has sent thousands of tiny experiments into space, and is ready to send up another batch this coming September.

The concept is simple for the students participating — slice open a ball, put something inside you want to test at high experiments, then repackage it and decorate
 it for the big trip up. The balloons will soar to about 19 miles (30 kilometers), which is well below the Karman Line of 62 miles or 100 kilometers that marks the edge of space. Don’t discount that, however — you will still see black skies and the curvature of the Earth from that altitude.

Ancient Martian Life May Be Preserved in Glass

When large asteroids or comets strike the Earth — as they have countless times throughout our planet’s history — the energy released in the event creates an enormous amount of heat, enough to briefly melt rock and soil at the impact site. That molten material quickly cools, trapping organic material and bits of plants and preserving them inside fragments of glass for tens of thousands, even millions of years.

Researchers studying impact debris on Earth think that the same thing could very well have happened on Mars, and that any evidence for ancient life on the Red Planet might be found by looking inside the glass.