Canadian scientists have discovered a fragment of an ancient continent, suggesting that it was 10% larger than previously thought.

They were studying diamond samples from Baffin Island, a glacier-covered land mass near Greenland, when they noticed a remnant of North Atlantic Craton.

Cratons are ancient, stable parts of the Earth’s continental crust.

The North American Craton stretched from present-day Scotland to North America and broke apart 150m years ago.

Scientists chanced on the latest evidence as they examined exploration samples of kimberlite, a rock that often contains diamonds, from Baffin Island.

“For researchers, kimberlites are subterranean rockets that pick up passengers on their way to the surface,” University of British Columbia geologist Maya Kopylova said. “The passengers are solid chunks of wall rocks that carry a wealth of details on conditions far beneath the surface of our planet over time.”

Ms Kopylova and her colleagues says the sample bore a mineral signature that matched other portions of the North Atlantic Craton.

“Finding these ‘lost’ pieces is like finding a missing piece of a puzzle,” Ms Kopylova is quoted as saying in an article published by the University of British Columbia’s website.

The samples were taken from deep below the Chidliak Kimberlite Province in southern Baffin Island. Previous reconstructions of the Earth’s plates had been based on shallow rock samples formed at depths of one to 10km (six miles).

Ms Kopylova said the discovery adds about 10% to the known size of the craton. “Our knowledge is literally and symbolically deeper,” she said.

Every planet in our Solar System, including our own, is enclosed in a bubble of solar wind, emanating from our Sun at supersonic speeds.

The particles making up this wind create an invisible magnetic field, which protects us from the rest of interstellar space. For decades now, astronomers have been analysing this system of radiation and magnetism known as a heliosphere, mapping its boundaries in an effort to figure out what it looks like.

A collaborative new model from experts at several different universities now suggests it’s a weird amalgamation of pretty much all our theories. 

For many years, scientists thought the heliosphere looked more like a comet or a wind sock, with a round nose at one end and a trailing tail at the other.

This is how it is usually depicted in textbooks and articles, but in recent years, there are two other shapes that seem more likely.

In 2015, data from the Voyager 1 spacecraft suggested there were two tails, making the heliosphere look more like a weird croissant. Two years later data from the Cassini mission suggested we should do away with the whole tails thing altogether, making it more like a giant beach ball.

“You don’t accept that kind of change easily,” says Tom Krimigis, who led experiments on both Cassini and Voyager.

“The whole scientific community that works in this area had assumed for over 55 years that the heliosphere had a comet tail.”

Now, we may have to reshuffle our assumptions once again, because if the new model is right, the heliosphere could very well be shaped like both a deflated beach ball and a bulbous croissant, it just depends on where and how you define the boundary. 

The heliosphere is thought to extend more than twice as far as Pluto, with the solar wind constantly pushing up against interstellar matter, protecting us from charged particles which could otherwise tear through our Solar System.

But figuring out where this boundary exists is like trying to figure out which shade of grey should distinguish black from white.

Using data from the New Horizons spacecraft, which is now exploring beyond Pluto, astronomers have figured out a way to tease the two sides apart.

Instead of assuming charged particles are all the same, the new model breaks them down into two groups: charged particles from the solar wind and neutral particles drifting in the Solar System.

Unlike charged particles in interstellar space, these neutral “pickup ions” can slip through the heliosphere easily, before having their electrons knocked off.

By comparing the temperature, density and speed of these pickup ions to solar waves, the team has figured out a way to define the shape of the heliosphere.

“The depletion of [pickup ions], due to charge exchange with the neutral hydrogen atoms of the interstellar medium in the heliosheath, cools the heliosphere, ‘deflating’ it and leading to a narrower heliosheath and a smaller and rounder shape, confirming the shape suggested by Cassini observations,” the authors write.

In other words, depending on which ‘shade of grey’ you pick to define the boundary, the heliosphere can look either like a deflated sphere or a crescent moon.

“If we want to understand our environment we’d better understand all the way through this heliosphere,” says astronomer Avi Loeb from Harvard.

But we still need way more data. While we are slowly starting to reconcile our models, they are still limited by how little we know about the heliosphere itself.

Apart from the two Voyager spacecrafts launched more than four decades ago, no other vehicle has passed beyond its boundary. And even the two craft that have passed that line don’t have the tools to measure pickup ions on the periphery.Paragraph

As such, some astronomers are calling on NASA to send out a probe in the next decade to investigate and start exploring the bubble of Sun that contains us.

“With the Interstellar Probe we hope to solve at least some of the innumerous mysteries that Voyagers started uncovering,” says astronomer Merav Opher from Boston University.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX will soon launch U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time since 2011.

NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 flight test will send two astronauts to the International Space Station in May, the first time American astronauts aboard an American rocket and spacecraft have visited the station since the final space shuttle mission on July 8, 2011.

NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will make the journey aboard Crew Dragon launched from SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “NASA and SpaceX are currently targeting no earlier than mid-to-late May for launch,” a statement released by NASA read.

In March, Musk’s Crew Dragon capsule made a round trip to the ISS, which lies in orbit more than 250 miles above Earth, with a mannequin on board. It returned to the Atlantic after six days in space, according to AFP.

The U.S. shut down space shuttle missions after 30 years in service in 2011, and since that time only the Russians have been going back and forth to the ISS.

SpaceX has made the trip 15 times since 2012 but only to refuel the station. However SpaceX is not the only private company servicing NASA: Boeing has also won a contract and is developing its own Starliner capsule.

An asteroid currently being tracked by NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CENOS), known as 2020 EF, will pass close enough to the planet to potentially ’cause an airburst’. However, the agency explains that we’re safe either way — the asteroid is too small to survive contact with Earth’s atmosphere.

The chunk of rock is currently on an Earth-intersecting orbit and is fast approaching the planet at more than 10,000 mph. CNEOS researchers estimate that it is about 98 feet in diameter, according to IBTimes.

Space rocks

2020 EF has been classified as an Aten asteroid, a group of asteroids whose orbits naturally come close to, and even intersect, that of Earth. This particular one follows a very wide orbit around the sun, giving it almost the same overall path of motion as Earth. The diagram also shows multiple near-approaches between 2020 EF and the planet.

After 2020 EF’s approach, Earth will then be visited by the asteroid 2020 DP4, which is traveling at a faster velocity and is much larger than 2020 EF.

Being so small, 2020 EF will most likely not cause an impact event and is much more liable to break apart if it enters Earth’s atmosphere, NASA explains. However, it might cause an airburst — an explosion in the sky. Ideally, you shouldn’t be looking at it when it happens.

The last recorded airburst took place over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, which produced a flash 30 times brighter than the Sun and caused 180 cases of eye pain and 70 cases of temporary flash blindness.

The asteroid is expected to approach Earth on March 18 at 11:15 p.m. EDT., at roughly 3.9 million miles from the planet’s center.

The countdown for a planned launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida automatically aborted in the last second before liftoff Sunday after an on-board computer detected unexpected data during an engine power check.

The dramatic last-second abort occurred at 9:22 a.m. EDT (1322 GMT) Sunday, moments after the Falcon 9’s main engines ignited on launch pad 39A.

A member of launch team announced engine start and liftoff. A second later, she said: “Disregard. We have an abort.”

There was an instantaneous launch opportunity Sunday, so the abort meant SpaceX had to scrub the day’s launch attempt.

The 229-foot-tall (70-meter) Falcon 9 rocket was set to loft 60 more Starlink satellites for SpaceX’s planned Internet service, joining 300 Starlink stations launched by five previous rockets since last May. SpaceX is launching the satellites 60 at a time, aiming to deploy more than 1,500 of the quarter-ton spacecraft to provide near-global service by late 2021 or 2022.

SpaceX tweeted later Sunday morning that a “standard auto-abort triggered due to out of family data during engine power check.”

Last-second aborts after engine ignition during SpaceX countdowns are rare, but they have happened before on several occasions. On the Falcon 9’s inaugural launch in June 2010, SpaceX aborted the countdown just before engine start and tried again the same afternoon, resulting in a successful mission that reached orbit.

The company said it will announce a new target launch date once the schedule is confirmed with the U.S. Space Force’s 45th Space Wing, which runs the Eastern Range that oversees all launch activity at Cape Canaveral.

An updated launch weather forecast released by the 45th Space Wing on Sunday suggested the next launch opportunity for the Falcon 9 rocket might be Wednesday at 8:21 a.m. EDT (1221 GMT).

The weather forecast shows an 80 percent chance of acceptable conditions for launch Wednesday morning with scattered clouds, light easterly winds, and a temperature of around 70 degrees Fahrenheit. The primary weather concern is with cumulus clouds.

The upcoming launch will mark the 83rd flight of a Falcon 9 rocket since 2010, and the sixth SpaceX launch of 2020.

The Falcon 9 is programmed to deploy its 60 Starlink payloads into an elliptical, or egg-shaped orbit ranging between 130 miles (210 kilometers) and 227 miles (366 kilometers) above Earth. The target orbit is inclined 53 degrees to the equator.

The two-stage launcher will head northeast from Cape Canaveral to reach the intended orbit. The Falcon 9’s reused first stage booster — flying for the fifth time on this mission — will attempt to land on SpaceX’s drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.