NASA scientists have said that an asteroid twice the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza is set to hit the Earth’s orbit on Sunday (September 6).

The asteroid called the 465824 (2010 FR) will be crossing the Earth’s orbit on September 6 2020.

The asteroid is reportedly travelling at a speed of 31,400 mph. The scientists have been tracking it since 2010. It was found by Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) on March 18, 2010.

The asteroid, dubbed 4, would be 4.6 million miles away from the Earth and would not pose a threat to the planet, however, it has been classified as “Near Earth Object” and a “Potentially Hazardous Asteroid” by NASA.

The asteroid is reported to be 120-270 metres in diameter which is twice as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has invited university-level students to pitch a method to harvest water from the Moon, in an attempt to encourage innovations in science and technology. It has announced a contest with a $10,000 stipend for those shortlisted.

Teams will be expected to submit their prototype or proposed concept design till November 24, 2020. Out of the designs received, NASA will pick up to 10 teams which will be selected to build and test their systems. The teams are also supposed to detect and differentiate between the differences in functionality between using this mechanism on Earth and the Moon. All of them will receive $10,000 development stipend.

This new contest called the ‘2021 Moon to Mars Ice and Prospecting Challenge’ comes under NASA’s Artemis program. Under the Artemis program, astronauts will be searching for water on the south pole of the moon. It is unknown in which form they will find water.

Most expeditions require a lot of water for purposes like trying and grow plants and make rocket propellant with it in space. Since carrying it from the Earth is a cumbersome process, NASA is now looking to harness the water that was detected to be present on the Moon.

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The scientists at Johns Hopkins University are digging deep down the Earth using a new technique that was originally designed and used in exploring the cosmos. An unusual team of space and earth scientists have used a new novel algorithm called the Sequencer, which was initially developed to find various interesting trends in the astronomical datasets.

This algorithm is developed by Menard and a graduate student Dalya Baron to be used in the astrophysics and geology department.

The scientists have unveiled structures present deep down the Earth that has paved a new map of the Earth. This map will exactly describe how the interiors of the Earth look like.

These findings, after their completion, will be published in the Science magazine.

Scientists use seismic waves to look deep inside the Earth the same as the doctors use ultrasound to look deep inside the human body. But, these findings will have to wait for the Earth to have an earthquake because, without any disturbance or motion in the Earth’s interior, the scientists will not be able to trace the seismic waves and guess the composition of the earth.

The Sequencer algorithm drifts through thousands of seismograms for echoes and creates a new map of the Earth’s mantle. The map reveals hot and dense regions below the Hawaii and Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia in the Pacific.

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Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Solar System Research in Germany have found out a parallel sun-earth system located 3000 light years away. The star Kepler-160 might have a planet of size twice less than earth size. There might be a supporting weather system for life because of the distance between the star and the planet. The type of light on KOI-456.04 is much similar to daylight on earth.

In the last 14 years, scientists have been able to discover over 4000 extrasolar planets around stars with the help of telescopes like CoRoT, Kepler and TESS. The star Kepler-160 was observed from 2009 to 2013 to get maximum possible details like its radius, surface temperature. For six years it is known to have two exoplanets, Kepler-160b and Kepler-160c, both bigger than earth. Surface temperature is said to be quite high but possibility of life was not ruled out. However, the small deviation in the orbit of Kepler-160c gives a possible glimpse of the third planet but this has not yet been confirmed by the scientists.

In the new study, Heller concluded that Kepler-160 is orbited by four planets and not two. One of the remaining two is supposed to be Kepler-160d due to which Kepler-160c has a deviated orbit, but the transition of Kepler-160d is not seen in the light curve. Light from Kepler-160 is very similar to sunlight. KOI-456.04 is in distance very much similar to earth and also it might have water like liquid on the surface.

These latest discoveries have been actively reported in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

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