Manicouagan Crater

This false-colour image featuring the Manicouagan Crater was captured by the Sentinel-1A satellite on 21 March.

Carved out by an asteroid strike some 214 million years ago, this crater in Quebec, Canada is known to be one of the oldest and largest impact craters on the planet. Experts believe that glaciers have since played a large part in its erosion.…

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NASA is tracking a large near-Earth asteroid as it passes by the Earth-Moon system on May 31st. Amateur astronomers in the northern hemisphere may be able to see the space rock for themselves during the 1st week of June.

Here we go again. Another asteroid is paying a visit to the Earth-Moon system.

Asteroids have been a hot topic since …

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On May 31, 2013, asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail serenely past Earth, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. And while QE2 is not of much interest to those astronomers and scientists on the lookout for hazardous asteroids, it is of interest to those who …

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ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered that our cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured. Peering through the dense atmosphere in the infrared, the orbiter found surface features were not quite where they should be.


Venus Express in orbit since 2006 around our nearest planetary neighbour. Credits: ESA

Using the VIRTIS instrument at infrared wavelengths to penetrate the …

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