NASA recently deployed a new early-warning system to identify asteroids passing dangerously close to Earth, and it looks like the system is working exactly as it should. The program, named Scout, already alerted astronomers to a potential close encounter Earth experienced with a somewhat scary-sized asteroid on Sunday night.

Scout, currently in development down at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, works by aggregating and analyzing data from a number of different telescopes. When it identifies a near-Earth Object (NEO), it both calculates the risk of impact and collects subsequent data gathered by other telescopes.

A handful of such objects are tracked pretty much every night. Sunday’s asteroid was never on a trajectory to actually crash into the Earth, but it did pass within about 300,000 miles and measured somewhere between around 16 and 80 feet across — which made it the kind of too-close-for-comfort object Scout was designed to alert us to. A companion program called Sentry is tasked with tracking larger ones. Asteroids measuring around 450 feet across are the ones approaching the size capable of destroying a major city, and astronomers hope that Sentry will one day be able to identify around 90 percent of those larger threats.

Of course, Scout and Sentry can only warn us about NEO’s on potentially dangerous trajectories — they can’t actually break them up or move them. Kind of like those weird LifeLock commercials that joke about monitoring the problem without being able to fix them, these kinds of programs still leave it up to us to develop a solution. Astronomer Ed Lu told NPR that the key to being able to divert NEO’s is early detection, at least a decade or two. When they’re that many billions of miles away, they can be “nudged” off course little by little.

NASA’s already on the case, working in conjunction with other major space science entities like the European Space Agency, Observatoire de la Côte d´Azur (OCA), and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL). The collaboration, known as the Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment (AIDA) Mission, is at the forefront of a potentially life-saving maneuver called the kinetic impact technique. This basically involves a spacecraft smashing into the worrisome asteroid in question, pushing it a fraction of a percent off its orbit. The idea is that by the time it reaches Earth, that gap will have widened significantly enough to keep it at a safe distance.

Photos via NASA

Amajor lunar mystery may have just been solved. Orientale basin — a 580-mile-wide crater — is one of the moon’s most striking features and resembles a large bull’s-eye. After pondering its origins for decades, scientists now think they’ve discovered how the crater’s concentric rings formed, and it’s more complicated than just a giant meteor pummeling into the surface.

A pair of articles published in the new issue of Science, explains how researchers used data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft to examine the lunar subsurface in order to piece together the giant crater’s history.

“Big impacts like the one that formed Orientale were the most important drivers of change on planetary crusts in the early solar system,” says Brandon Johnson, lead author of one of the papers and a co-author of the other. “Thanks to the tremendous data supplied by GRAIL, we have a much better idea of how these basins form, and we can apply that knowledge to big basins on other planets and moons.”

Maria Zuber, a a geophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead on the gravity field study, explained that they used GRAIL much like an X-ray machine. The spacecraft mapped the interior of the planet by using its own gravity. The lunar interior is made up of a myriad of materials, each with their own temperature, density, and composition. The surface also has a variety of features, and GRAIL measures the gravitational differences around all of these objects to map out what’s underneath.

“In the past, our view of Orientale basin was largely related to its surface features, but we didn’t know what the subsurface structure looked like in detail,” Jim Head, a geologist at Brown University in Rhode Island, a GRAIL scientist and a co-author of the new research, said in a statement. “The beauty of the GRAIL data is that it is like putting Orientale in an X-ray machine, and learning in great detail what the surface features correspond to in the subsurface.”

A color-coded map that shows the strength of surface gravity around the Orientale basin. 

By analyzing the GRAIL data, the researchers concluded that an object about 40 miles (64 km) across, struck the Moon while traveling at roughly 9 miles per second. The data also indicated that the three concentric rings surrounding the crater were not caused by the initial impact. Instead, they were formed by processes happening below the surface in response to the impact.

As the crust rebounded following the impact, molten rocks below the surface flowed toward the point of impact, causing the crust above to rise up, forming the jagged cliffs that make up the outer two rings.

The innermost ring, however, was formed by a different process. When the crust rebounds, it can form a central peak. But in Orientale’s case, that central peak was so massive that it was unstable, eventually collapsing into a ring-like structure.

Multi-ring craters exist all over the solar system, and future missions modeled after GRAIL could be sent to other planetary bodies to better understand their inner-workings. When similar craters formed on the Earth, the first single-celled organisms were emerging. By studying craters similar to Orientale, on places like Mars, it could give us a better understanding of whether or not life existed.

Photos via NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/GSFC/Ernest Wright

Paleontologists at Cambridge University have announced the discovery of the first known fossilized dinosaur brain tissue — ever. It’s a small fossil, and a huge deal.

The rock, just a few inches long, was picked up in 2004 by fossil hunter Jamie Hiscocks on a beach in the south of England after a storm. Since then, paleontologists have been working on making a solid case that it is what they think it is: exquisitely preserved tissue from the outer layer of the brain of an iguanodon, or similar dinosaur that lived 133 million years ago.

Fossils that wash up on shore have already lost a lot of important information about their origin, often changing shape, and making it difficult to figure out what it originally was. But the evidence — at least for this piece of detritus — is all pointing in one direction.

The rock fits neatly into the brain cavity of an iguanodon, based on known fossils, and it likely came from the Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation, which is 133- million-years-old, and coincides with when iguanodons would have been hanging out in the area.

The brain might have belonged to an animal that looked something like this.

The soft tissues on the outer layer of the fossil are exquisitely preserved — you can even see the blood vessels running through it. The patterns match what we see today in the closest living relatives of the dinosaurs: crocodiles and birds.

Soft tissue fossils from the dinosaur era are rare finds and require very special circumstances for preservation. Although fossilized stomachs, skin, feathers, and even blood vessels have been found, many scientists would have said we’d never find a brain — until we did.

Cambridge paleontologist David Norman, who announced the discovery at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting in Utah this week, theorizes that the animal died and sank to the bottom of a shallow, stagnant pond. It flipped over on its head, which became buried in the muck. The conditions in the pond would have had to be inhospitable to bacteria in order for the tissue to stay intact long enough to become mineralized.

Scanning electron microscopy images show what appear to be meningeal blood vessels on the surface of the fossilized brain.

In Norman’s telling, the main mass of the brain ultimately eroded, and was replaced with sediment. The fossil, as it exists today, is mostly made up of debris, preserved in the shape of the brain casing, and enveloped by a very thin layer of fossilized brain material.

This last point was one Norman debated for years with Oxford paleobiologist Martin Brasier, who was involved with the find at an earlier point, and theorized that perhaps the brain had been fossilized in its entirety. Brasier died suddenly in a car crash in 2014, although he left behind notes later found by a former student that indicated he had come around entirely to Norman’s point of view.

The discovery of the fossil will be published in a special edition of Earth System Evolution and Early Life, honoring Brasier’s life and contributions to science.

This brain will certainly be the focus of intense research and debate among paleontologists for years, and decades, to come. Assuming the findings hold up to the scrutiny, this fossil will open up new possibilities into the study of the physical structure of dinosaur brains, and what they might have been thinking.

Photos via I,Steveoc 86/Wikimedia, David Norman, Jamie Hiscocks