Lucy Mission Set to Launch on October 16
Pending good weather and no problems, the Lucy spacecraft will launch from Cape Canaveral early in the morning on October 16. Lucy was selected in 2014 as NASA’s thirteenth Discovery-class mission […]
Tag Archives: solar system formation
Two Stages of Planet Formation Could Explain Early Solar System Architecture
Geochemical analyses of meteorites and other planetary materials provide important clues about the origin and evolution of the solar system. For example, nucleosynthetic isotope anomalies, which reflect primordial reservoirs in […]
Early-Forming Solids May Have Changed the Composition of the Protoplanetary Disk
In the earliest periods of solar system formation, the protoplanetary disk was a hot environment full of gas and dust. As the disk cooled, various elemental species condensed out of […]
Terrestrial Planet Formation from Local Materials
Many planetary materials exhibit distinct isotopic compositions. For example, oxygen isotopic compositions differ among the terrestrial planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. These differences indicate that each planet formed from […]
Dating Presolar Grains: A Tale Older Than Time
How did our solar system form and what are the components that ultimately led to the current chemical makeup of our little piece of cosmic real estate? The lyrics “we […]
How Our Solar System Got Its ‘Great Divide’
Various types of meteorites sampled in our meteorite collection display a distinct dichotomy in their chemical and isotopic compositions, suggesting that there was a divide between the inner (terrestrial) and […]
Fast Times in the Early Solar System
Calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, CAIs, are light-colored masses in carbonaceous chondrite meteorites — they are the first formed solids in the solar system. Being so old, they provide a unique view into […]
Postdoctoral and Graduate Fellowships at the Smithsonian
Postdoctoral and Graduate Fellowships. The Department of Mineral Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution – National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) invites applications for both postdoctoral and graduate fellowships. Active areas […]