Sunday Science: NASA’s Roman Telescope Leaves Earth To Chart the Stars
The New York Times
Borrowing a page from Hollywood’s playbook, NASA on Tuesday launched its first-ever attempt to redirect an asteroid, an important test for the future of the defense of the Earth from catastrophic impacts.
Larsen C, a floating platform of glacial ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is the fourth largest ice shelf ringing Earth’s southernmost continent. In 2014, a crack that had been slowly growing into the ice shelf for decades suddenly started to spread northwards, creating the nascent iceberg. Now that the close to 2,240 square-mile (5,800 square kilometers) chunk of ice has broken away, the Larsen C shelf area has shrunk by approximately 10 percent.
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