What You Need To Know About Asteroids and Other Near-Earth Objects
Have burning questions about asteroids? NASA experts have answers! (Spoiler Alert: none of them will hit Earth.) Our solar system is littered with asteroids and…
Have burning questions about asteroids? NASA experts have answers! (Spoiler Alert: none of them will hit Earth.) Our solar system is littered with asteroids and…
Team members of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) have filled the spacecraft with fuel, have performed many of the final tests, and are running…
What are the Trojan asteroids? These mysterious space rocks have been gravitationally trapped in Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun for billions of years and hold…
If an asteroid is determined to be on an Earth-impacting trajectory, scientists typically want to stage a deflection, where the asteroid is gently nudged by…
Bennu and Ryugu are two rubble-pile asteroids that were recently photographed by unmanned spacecrafts. Both asteroids have a distinctive diamond shape, the formation of which…
Scientists thought Bennu’s surface was like a sandy beach, abundant in fine sand and pebbles, which would have been perfect for collecting samples. Past telescope…
Does NASA know about ALL the asteroids? Not exactly. We know about the vast majority of larger ones and none of those pose an impact…
Study finds collisions that stalled oxygen growth on planet more common than thought. Between 2.5 and 4 billion years ago, a time known as the…
Is Planetary Defense PI in the Sky? In February of 2013, skywatchers around the world turned their attention toward asteroid 2012 DA14, a cosmic rock…
SwRI’s Levison, Olkin lead the mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft is encapsulated in a protective fairing atop an Atlas V rocket, awaiting…
On October 16, 2021, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will begin its journey to visit a record-breaking number of asteroids. The 12-year mission starts from NASA’s Kennedy…
About a kilometer across, space rock 2021 PH27 is the Sun’s nearest neighbor. Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile, astronomers recently…
Using data from NASA OSIRIS-REx mission, a University of Arizona-led team of scientists concluded that asteroids with highly porous rocks, such as Bennu, should lack…
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft will launch in October 2021 on a 12-year journey to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The Lucy mission will include three Earth gravity assists…
NASA is ready for the upcoming launch of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, an evaluation of technologies for preventing a hazardous asteroid from…
Set to launch next year, NASA’s Psyche mission marks the first time the agency has set out to explore an asteroid richer in metal than…
New research into metal-rich asteroids reveals information about the origins and compositions of these rare bodies that could one day be mined. Metal-rich near-Earth asteroids,…
Brown scientists are analyzing a tiny chunk of the asteroid Ryugu in an effort to better understand the early history of the solar system. In…