FT summary of current space mining plans

The Financial Times has just published a handy layman's digest

of what various countries and private companies

are currently focusing upon in terms of preparing the ground

for future space mining ventures.

Link to: FT article

"Shangri-La meteorites" for sale?

Since a fireball over China was sighted on 4 October 2017,

the hunt for fragments of a new meteorite has been on

but there has been no scientific evidence so far

that any authentic samples have as yet been found

(although some have allegedly already been sold).

A concisely instructive article on this particular topic

 has recently been published by XINHUANET,

which also focuses on the subject of related ownership rights in China.

Link to: Xinhuanet article

Goodbye flyby and see you later

Having come within 8,000 kilometres
of  "the 36,000 km plane at which hundreds of geosynchronous satellites orbit our planet"

Asteroid 2012 TC4 has gone (for now)

but should be back in 2050

and (perhaps dangerously closer) in 2079.

Link to: AFP article in phys.org/news

Link to: European Space Agency 12-second footage on YouTube

60 years ago: Sputnik 1

beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep

that's how it all began

Link to: Audio "Sputnik beep"

Picture by JR. CHINREST

There is a very interesting 4th October 2017 article

by Matthew Bodner in Spacenews.com

on the former Soviet Union and on Russia's space endeavours,

entitled "60 years after Sputnik, Russia is lost in space".

Link to: Spacenews.com

Martian impact 55 years ago today

On 3rd October 1962 an 18 kilogram Mars meteorite

(the largest of its kind found so far)

narrowly missed a farmer as it crashed into a field

near Zagami Rock in the Katsina Province of Nigeria.

Since the late 1980s much of this meteorite 

has been repeatedly cut up into increasingly finer pieces

so that it has become the most widely distributed Martian meteorite ever.

The so-called Lucite "Mars Cube", for instance, 

contains an embedded vial with just 1/10 carat 

of what is officially known as "Zagami".

                                                   Link to: jpl.nasa.gov Zagami webpage
                                                   Link to: The Meteoritical Society

                                                       ( For current research findings on
                                    " environments that would have been potentially habitable
                                          for Earth-like life on Mars", follow the link below:
                                        Link to: Los Angeles Times, Science Now, 2 Oct 2017 )