Asteroids
Hayabusa2’s Mission isn’t Over. It has a New Asteroid Target to Visit: 1998 KY26
In an expected move, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced a mission extension for their Hayabusa2 spacecraft. Hayabusa2…
Chinese Asteroid Mining Robot Due to Launch in November
Does it seem like science is catching up with science fiction? Sometimes it does. Especially when there's an announcement like…
Astronomers Have Discovered a 2-km Asteroid Orbiting Closer to the Sun than Venus
Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized…
Bennu is Constantly Getting Sandblasted by Tiny Meteoroids
As soon as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at asteroid Bennu in December 2018, there was a big surprise. Scientists expected…
There are Three Asteroids Hiding in this Animation, See If You Can Find Them
This summer, the European Space Agency’s Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre (NEOCC) started posting “riddles” or challenges on their website. These…
Completely Harmless Asteroid Almost Certainly Won’t Hit Earth Just Before the US Election
In a year of devastating wildfires, destructive derechos, early and active hurricanes, widespread social unrest, contentious politics and more --…
It’s Starting to Look Like Ceres is an Ocean World, Too
A new and thorough analysis of high-resolution images and data from NASA’s Dawn mission have now provided fresh insights into…
There Might Be an Entire Orbit, Filled with Asteroids that Came from Outside the Solar System
Some asteroids orbit the Sun in highly inclined orbits, and they might be aliens to our solar system.
800 Million Years Ago, it Was Raining Asteroids on the Earth and Moon
Natural processes here on Earth continually re-shape the planet's surface. Craters from ancient asteroid strikes are erased in a short…
Rocks on Bennu are Cracking Because of the Constant Day/Night Cycling
Asteroid Bennu is blanketed by rocks and huge boulders. And now that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is taking a close look…