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10 December 2013
Students collecting space dust may help find distant planets
NASA’s fastest spacecraft collects dust like no other scientific instrument. Hurtling through space on its one-way trip toward Pluto, New Horizons is measuring space dust — a technique that could help astronomers find planets in other solar systems.
26 August 2013
Why sunspots won’t help you make a fortune on wheat futures
A claim by 1800s astronomer William Herschel says the Sun’s moods influence things here on Earth in a more immediate way. Herschel asserted that the number of dark splotches on the Sun, called sunspots, significantly affects the wholesale price of wheat grain. Jeffery Love, a geophysicist for the US Geological Survey, decided to put this claim to the test. Such correlations, if they existed, would provide a useful analog for scientists researching historical solar activity.
15 February 2011
A First for the Inner Frontier: Q&A with Sean Solomon on the MESSENGER mission
Sean C. Solomon, Principal Investigator for the MESSENGER mission and a former president of the American Geophysical Union, spoke with GeoSpace about the mission’s goals, Mercury’s potential to surprise, and his own path in research. He gave GeoSpace a sneak preview of topics he might be discussing during his talk at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this Sunday in Washington, D.C.
GeoSpace is a blog on Earth and space science, managed by AGU’s Public Information staff. The blog features posts by AGU writers and guest contributors on all sorts of relevant science topics, but with a focus on new research and geo and space sciences-related stories that are currently in the news.