Orex 13/02/17
Where is the Spacecraft? - OSIRIS-REx Mission
http://www.asteroidmission.org/where-is-the-spacecraft/

Astronomers zoom in on megastar's juvenile outburst
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-astronomers-megastar-juvenile-outburst.html

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, a supergiant red star ended its life in a spectacular explosion known as a supernova.

The light from that event took 160 million years to reach Earth where, in a stroke of luck, robot telescopes scanning the night
sky happened upon it on October 6, 2013.

On Monday, astronomers said the chance discovery allowed them to study the earliest phase of a supernova yet—just three hours
after it erupted.

"We immediately knew that what we have in hand is extremely unique," Ofer Yaron of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel,
lead author of a study in the journal Nature Physics, told AFP.

"We managed to observe this event when (it was) very young." The supernova was named SN 2013fs.

Scientists make huge dataset of nearby stars available to public | MIT News
http://news.mit.edu/2017/dataset-nearby-stars-available-public-exoplanets-0213
Users can search database of 1,600 stars to find signs of new exoplanets.

The search for planets beyond our solar system is about to gain some new recruits.

Today, a team that includes MIT and is led by the Carnegie Institution for Science has released the largest collection of observations
made with a technique called radial velocity, to be used for hunting exoplanets. The huge dataset, taken over two decades by the W.M. Keck
Observatory in Hawaii, is now available to the public, along with an open-source software package to process the data and an online tutorial.

By making the data public and user-friendly, the scientists hope to draw fresh eyes to the observations, which encompass almost 61,000
measurements of more than 1,600 nearby stars.

“This is an amazing catalog, and we realized there just aren’t enough of us on the team to be doing as much science as could come out of this
dataset,” says Jennifer Burt, a Torres Postdoctoral Fellow in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “We’re trying to shift
toward a more community-oriented idea of how we should do science, so that others can access the data and see something interesting.”

Burt and her colleagues have outlined some details of the newly available dataset in a paper to appear in The Astronomical Journal. After taking
a look through the data themselves, the researchers have detected over 100 potential exoplanets, including one orbiting GJ 411, the fourth-closest
star to our solar system.

Webb Telescope Structure Practice Move
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeeJAkr272Y

Don’t blame asteroids for the Late Heavy Bombardment! | astrobites
https://astrobites.org/2017/02/10/dont-blame-asteroids-for-the-late-heavy-bombardment/

Asteroids have a bad reputation. They may have wiped out the dinosaurs, and they have threatened the survival of humanity in many terrible movies.
Until today’s featured paper, asteroids were also blamed for the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB, for short) – a period of time in the early solar system when the Moon,
the Earth, and the other rocky planets were hit with an unusually high amount of impactors from a variety of material in space. It lasted from the Sun’s formation
4.6 billion years (Gyr) ago until the impact that created the Orientale crater on the Moon 800 million years later (3.8 Gyr ago). Planetary scientists working on
the Apollo missions in the 1960s first hypothesized the LHB when astronauts brought back impact melt rocks from various craters that unexpectedly all dated back to
this time. The idea was later extended to include the rest of the inner solar system when planetary scientists found similar cratering histories on each of the rocky
planets. These LHB-era impacts are believed to have been caused by some combination of asteroids (from the asteroid belt), comets (from the Kuiper Belt and beyond),
and leftover material from the formation of the inner rocky planets. However, it is still not clear which of these three sources was the main culprit.
To address one part of this issue, Nesvorny et al. – the authors of today’s paper, ask: Were there enough impacting asteroids to account for all of the craters on
the Moon from the Late Heavy Bombardment?

Fireball Meteor Above Mt. Hakusan
Taken by Yasushi Aoshima on December 2, 2016 @ Ishikawa, JAPAN

Oxygen Increased When Earth Was Covered in Ice - Astrobiology Magazine
http://www.astrobio.net/also-in-news/oxygen-increased-earth-covered-ice/

In the beginning, planet Earth was a very inhospitable place with no oxygen and only single-celled bacteria as inhabitants. According to a new study,
the oxygen content in the air began to increase about 2.4 billion years ago, at the same time as the global glaciation and when all continents were gathered
in a single huge landmass, or supercontinent. How to explain the exact connection between these events, however, is a question that baffles the researchers.

“Our results also show that oxidation coincided in time with an event of global glaciation of the Earth and extensive volcanism”, says Ulf Söderlund,
Professor of Geology at the Faculty of Science at Lund University in Sweden.

In the recent international study, researchers from Lund University, among others, have pinpointed the timing of this so-called Great Oxidation Event —
a crucial starting point in the development of life.

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