I was originally gonna call this “carbonaceous chondrites” but I don’t know if that’s the right term. I’m kind of new to asteroid classification, and I’m not intending to become an expert.

I’m working on a hard science fiction story/rpg/zine and I’m trying to do “research.”

So question(s),

1. Are there asteroids that are pretty much like clumps of dirt?

2. What’s the composition of that material?

3. How much of it is out there?

4. And could we use it to make a growing substrate for plants?

My college background is in botany, and work background is in social work/education. Basically what I want to come down to is, will all space agriculture need to focus on hydroponics, or can we get a good growing medium from space rocks?

I’m aware of perchlorate salts basically making Mark Watney’s potato farm a non-starter, even with poop. I’m kind of hoping that asteroids might not have that problem

Hey everyone! I'm in the process of creating a website dedicated to local, national, and international meteorite maps and meteorite-related content, and I'd love to get some input from this awesome community.

I'm planning to cover things like meteorite hunting tips, impact site maps, and historical meteor events, but before I dive in, I wanted to as if anyone had any content or resources they’d particularly like to see.

Any suggestions, big or small, would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance

#Asteroid Watch

In 2013, an asteroid exploded just 15 miles above Earth’s surface, creating a huge fireball that briefly outshone the sun in the sky. The resulting shock wave shattered windows in the nearest town, more than 40 miles away in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The impactor had escaped detection by astronomers.

#What's new:

Since the 2013 impact, scientists have discovered an additional 200,000 near-Earth asteroids, more than had been found in all of history up to 2013. In 2022 NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) slammed a spacecraft into a small asteroid and slowed its orbit by about a half hour, successfully altering the cosmic body’s trajectory.

#The future:

The Chelyabinsk asteroid took us by surprise but it won’t be the last, writes Phil Plait, astronomer and science communicator. Bigger impactors are rare, but we’re sharpening our detectors and tools to be able to deal with them. In fact, “thanks to new projects such as NEO Surveyor and the Vera Rubin Observatory, within a decade or two we’ll have found upward of 90 percent of the asteroids that may threaten Earth in the next hundred years,” says science journalist Robin George Andrews, who this year published a new book, How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense.