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The European Space Agency made history in an ambitious attempt to land a spacecraft on the surface of a comet.

The Taurids meteor shower is active throughout November with a double radiant and a double peak. Observers can usually expect around 10 meteors per hour from dark sky locations, but moonlight could wash out many in the first third of the month.

The tiny fragments burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, debris from the periodic comet 2P/Encke, will reach peaks of activity on the 5th (Southern radiant) and 12th/13th November (Northern radiant).

NASA is developing a first-ever mission to identify, capture and redirect a near-Earth asteroid to a stable orbit around the moon, where astronauts will explore it in the 2020s, returning with samples.

This Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is part of NASA’s plan to advance the new technologies and spaceflight experience needed for humans to pioneer Mars in the 2030s.

http://www.nasa.gov/content/what-is-nasa-s-asteroid-redirect-mission/

The comet, discovered at Siding Spring Observatory last year, is anticipated to pass through the ecliptic on Sunday 19th October 2014, bringing it very close to Mars.

An auction in New York City is offering 125 meteorites for sale. The sale is being held on October the 14th by Heritage auctions.

Included in the sale is a large chunk of the moon, a 179-pound iron meteorite, a piece of the Peekskill meteorite (which is famous for puncturing a Chevy Malibu) and a complete slice of the Willamette meteorite.

Robb Elliot, a meteorite hunter, believes he has found meteorite rocks worth £1 million.

He was hoping to find fragments of the Perth meteorite which fell in 1830 but instead, in a potato field (he declines to announce the location), he made one of the UK's biggest finds. He will only say that he discovered them in fields between Errol and Balbeggie in Perthshire

He says the meteorite chunks are worth about £50 a gram, which is equivalent to gold, and Elliot plans on sharing the profits with the farmers who give permission for a wider search on their fields.

On Sept. 21st, the police received many calls from all over Scotland reporting possible plane crashes or weird fireworks. Experts now think these were caused by either a meteorite or space junk burning up in the atmosphere.

One eye-witness said "This bright light caught my eye and this ball if fire with a long green tail was coming over the hill," another observer said it appeared to be "something pretty large breaking up in the atmosphere."

What is considered the biggest meteorite to have fallen in the UK was on display for two weeks in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire museum.

Experts say the 90kg meteorite landed on earth 30,000 years ago. It is believed to have been discovered in Wiltshire by Edward Duke in the 19th century.

A statue that was recovered by Germans in 1938 from Tibet was carved from an extremely valuable and rare meteorite.

The statue, which is thought to represent the god Vaisravana and has a swastika on its stomach, is 1000 years old and 24cm tall, weighing 10kg. The ‘Iron man' was discovered by Ernst Schafer, whose expedition was supported by the Nazis. It then went into a private collection and disappeared from view until 2007 when the owner sought advice about its origins from Dr Elmar Buchner.

If earthbound asteroids and comets can hit Earth with Armageddon-like consequences, deflection by NASA and other agencies is likely, right? Perhaps, but politics is the invisible threat difficult to overcome.

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