4.5 km Asteroid Tumbles Past Earth
NASA’s Goldstone radar is capturing new images of the 4.5 km asteroid Toutatis as it passes by Earth this month. This week, NASA’s Goldstone radar…
Asteroid News
Asteroid Collision Led to the Mass Extinction of Lizards and Snakes
A newly published study details the mass extinction of lizards and snakes that occurred after an asteroid struck the Earth 65.5 million years ago, finding…
5-Mile Wide Buried Asteroid Crater Discovered in Canada
A 5-mile (8-kilometer) wide and 3,000-foot (900-meter) deep asteroid impact crater has been hidden near Bow City, Alberta, for millions of years. Bow City has…
New Images of Near-Earth Asteroid 2007 PA8
Nine new radar images were taken of asteroid 2007 PA8, a near-Earth asteroid that measures roughly 1.6 kilometers wide. 2007 PA8 passed at a distance…
NASA’s Dawn Gets a Close Up View of the Canuleia Crater on Vesta
New data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft shows a close up of the Canuleia Crater on the asteroid Vesta, illustrating the structure of the interior of…
Space-Launched Paintballs Could Possibly Deflect an Incoming Asteroid
The 2012 Move an Asteroid Technical Paper Competition winner, Sung Wook Paek, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, proposed using a…
NASA’s WISE Uncovers New Clues on Jovian Trojans
New data from WISE answers several questions about Jovian Trojans, asteroids that orbit the sun on the same path as Jupiter, and is the first…
Asteroid Dust Could Shield Earth From Harmful Solar Radiation
Scottish scientists have proposed to use a giant space-based dust cloud, blasted off an asteroid, to shade the Earth from the sun. Deliberately manipulating the…
Orbits of a Near-Earth Asteroid and a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid
This NASA image of the day shows the differences between orbits of a typical near-Earth asteroid and a potentially hazardous asteroid, or PHA. The Hustle…
Trajectory Models of Refractory Particles Help Solve Two Solar System Puzzles
In a newly published study, astrophysicists detail how they modeled the trajectories of refractory particles in the unstable disk of gas and dust that formed…
Near Miss Asteroid – An Opportunity To Test a Rapid Response Program
As an international team of astronomers continues to monitor the skies for approaching asteroids, the recent approach of a 23-foot-wide asteroid gave scientists an opportunity…
New Video Highlights Asteroid Vesta’s Surface Composition in Many Colors
As scientists continue to review data from NASA’s dawn Mission, a new video adds color to highlight differences in surface composition that are too subtle…
NEOWISE Data Reveals Potentially Hazardous Asteroids
New data from NEOWISE reveals a more credible estimate of the numbers and sizes of potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs, within our solar system. Observations…
Tiny “Spherules” Record Precise Information About Asteroid Impacts on Earth
A new method for extracting precise information from tiny “spherules” embedded in layers of rock has allowed researchers to record precise information about asteroids impacting…
Dawn Mission Reveals the Inner Secrets of Vesta
Launched in 2007, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft began exploring the asteroid Vesta in 2011 and just provided researchers with the first orbital analysis of the giant…
Billionaires and Futurists Plan Space Missions to Mine Asteroids for Metals
It’s been long thought, especially in science fiction, that once Earth’s dwindling metallic resources dry up, the human race would look to the stars for…
Dawn Images Shine New Light on Vesta
New images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft have revealed previously unknown geological features about the asteroid Vesta. While Vesta is one of the brightest objects in…
New WISE Atlas of Entire Infrared Sky Contains Over 18,000 Images
After more than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light and more than 15 trillion bytes of returned data from the WISE…