Asteroids
Eight Missions are Getting Extensions, Most Exciting: OSIRIS-REx is Going to Asteroid Apophis
NASA has granted mission extensions to eight different planetary missions, citing the continued excellent operations of the spacecraft, but more…
Asteroid Ryugu Might Actually Be a Dead Comet
In 2014, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA launched the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to visit asteroid Ryugu. It arrived at the…
The Building Blocks of Earth Could Have Come From Farther out in the Solar System
Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago via accretion. Earth's building blocks were chunks of rock of varying sizes. From…
A Tiny Asteroid was Discovered Mere Hours Before it Crashed Into the Earth
Last week, a small asteroid was detected just two hours before it impacted Earth’s atmosphere. Luckily, it was only about…
Thanks to Observations, a Potentially Dangerous Asteroid was Found to be Harmless
Earlier this year, the discovery of a potentially hazardous asteroid took astronomers on a roller coaster ride. On January 6,…
Last-Minute Defense Against an Asteroid That Could Obliterate it Before Impact
Gazing at the night sky can evoke a sense of wonder regarding humanity's place in the Universe. But that's not…
We don’t Know Exactly When the Dinosaurs Died, but Now We Know it was in the Springtime
We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the…
An Asteroid has Been Discovered With Three Moons!
Planets aren’t the only celestial objects with moons - asteroids can have them too. They are usually other, smaller asteroids…
A Tracking System is now Scanning the Entire sky Every 24 Hours Looking for Dangerous Asteroids
As evidenced by a recent Netflix movie, dangerous asteroids can come from anywhere. So there was an obvious weakness in…
Astronomers Finally Find a Second Asteroid in Earth’s Trojan Belt
Earth has a new companion. Asteroid 2020 XL5, a newly discovered kilometer-wide carbonaceous space rock, has been discovered at Earth’s…