Asteroids Archives

September 27, 2022September 27, 2022 by Nancy Atkinson

This is the Last Thing DART saw as it Smashed Into its Asteroid Target

The last complete image of asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, taken by the DRACO imager on NASA’s DART mission from ~7 miles (12 kilometers) from the asteroid and 2 seconds before impact. The image shows a patch of the asteroid that is 100 feet (31 meters) across. Dimorphos’ north is toward the top of the image. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

The first-ever planetary defense technology demonstration mission successfully conducted its mission, slamming into the surface of a distant asteroid and going out in a blaze of glory. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft acted as a kinetic impactor, colliding with the small and harmless asteroid Dimorphos on September 26 at 7:14PM ET, with the hope of deflecting it.

September 10, 2022September 11, 2022 by Matt Williams

DART Sees Asteroid Didymos for the First Time. In two Weeks, it’ll Crash Into its Moon

This image of the light from asteroid Didymos and its orbiting moonlet Dimorphos. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/DART Navigation Team

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is on its way to rendezvous with the double-asteroid Didymos. When it arrives on September 26^th, DART will collide with Dimorphos – the 160-meter (525-foot) moonlet that orbits the main body – to evaluate the kinetic impact technique for the very first time. This proposed method of planetary defense consists of a spacecraft colliding with an asteroid to alter its orbit and prevent it from colliding with Earth. In July, DART took its first image of the double-asteroid, which NASA released earlier this week!

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 by Andy Tomaswick

Asteroids are Constantly Spitting out Pebbles

Asteroids are commonly thought of as solid balls of rock and metal – a place where Bruce Willis can land and stick a nuke into the middle of it. But as we learn more about them, it is becoming more evident that many asteroids are just piles of rubble held loosely together by gravity. So it might not be too big of a surprise when some of those pieces of rubble fly off of the asteroid itself. But it surprised scientists who first observed the phenomena on the asteroid Bennu when OSIRIS-REx visited it in 2019. Now a team led by researchers at the field museum found a meteorite that shows signs it underwent the same process.

August 23, 2022August 23, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

Samples From Asteroid Ryugu Contain Bits That Came From Outside the Solar System

Asteroid Ryugu, as imaged by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft. The red dot marks the sampling location. Image Credit: JAXA/Hayabusa2

Long before our Sun began to form, stars were dying in our part of the galaxy. One of them exploded as a supernova. The catastrophe created minute grains of dust and the force of the explosion blasted through a nearby cloud of gas and dust. That action seeded the cloud with “alien” materials from the dead star. The shock wave from the supernova also caused the cloud to collapse in on itself to create the Sun. The “leftovers” of the cloud became the planets, moons, rings, comets, and asteroids of our solar system.

August 18, 2022August 14, 2022 by Paul M. Sutter

Lucy’s Solar Array is Fixed! (Mostly)

Artist’s concept of the Lucy spacecraft flying by Eurybates, one of the six diverse and scientifically important Trojans to be studied. . Credit: SWRI

How do you fix the solar array of a spacecraft millions of miles away from the Earth hurdling through the void at thousands of miles per hour? Very carefully, that’s how.

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022 by Nancy Atkinson

Watch OSIRIS-REx's Complex Orbital Path Around Bennu in This Cool Animation

OSIRIS-REx mission timeline. Credit: NASA.

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft conducted a two-year reconnaissance and sample collection at the asteroid Bennu, providing crucial data about the 500-meter-wide potentially hazardous rubble pile/space rock. When OSIRIS-REx arrived on Dec. 3, 2018, it needed some tricky navigation and precise maneuvers to make the mission work.

Experts at NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio created an amazing visualization of the path the spacecraft took during its investigations. A short film called “A Web Around Asteroid Bennu” highlights the complexity of the mission, and the film is being shown at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a festival honoring standout works of computer animated storytelling.

July 26, 2022July 26, 2022 by Laurence Tognetti

OSIRIS-REx Would Have Sunk Deep into Asteroid Bennu if it Tried to Land

A pair of studies published in Science and Science Advances have helped identify that NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft would have sunk into the asteroid Bennu had the spacecraft not fired its thrusters immediately after collecting samples from the surface of the small planetary body in October 2020. The respective studies examined the loosely packed exterior of Bennu, comparing its surface to stepping into a pit of plastic balls that people of all ages enjoy. The paper in Science was led by Dr. David Lauretta, Principal Investigator of OSIRIS-REx and a Regents Professor at the University of Arizona, and the paper in Science Advances was led by Dr. David Walsh, a member of the OSIRIS-REx team from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

July 25, 2022July 25, 2022 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

The Sun is Eroding Asteroids

The asteroid Bennu from a distance of 24 km (15) miles captured by the PolyCam on OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft has detected water on Bennu. On the bottom right in the termination line is the large boulder. The image is a mosaic constructed of 12 images. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona.

Asteroids have been around since early solar system times. However, just because they are ancient bits of history doesn’t mean they don’t change. They collide, they break apart, and now, it turns out their surfaces can erode. That’s due to heat from the Sun. It fractures surface rocks on asteroids and causes what’s called “surface regeneration”. Over time, the cracked and shattered materials can scatter across the surface or even get ejected into space.

How do we know about this erosion? Planetary scientists working on the OSIRIS-REx mission noticed that the surface of asteroid Bennu has rock fractures caused by solar heating. They found that it takes the Sun only about 10,000 to 100,000 years to break up surface rocks on asteroids. This results in a young surface topography on a piece of solar system real estate that’s billions of years old.

July 20, 2022July 20, 2022 by Evan Gough

Uh Oh, NASA is Reviewing Psyche and May Terminate the Mission

NASA's mission to asteroid 16 Psyche has been delayed. Now a review panel is examining the delay. Credit: Maxar/ASU/P. Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA is reviewing its mission to visit the asteroid 16 Psyche. The Administration has convened a 15-member review board to examine the mission and its failure to meet the scheduled 2022 launch. The review began on July 19, and the board will present their findings to NASA and JPL in late September.

July 19, 2022July 19, 2022 by Evan Gough

We’ll be Building Self-Replicating Probes to Explore the Milky Way Sooner Than you Think. Why Haven’t ETIs?

An early NASA concept of an interstellar space probe. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

The future can arrive in sudden bursts. What seems a long way off can suddenly jump into view, especially when technology is involved. That might be true of self-replicating machines. Will we combine 3D printing with in-situ resource utilization to build self-replicating space probes?

One aerospace engineer with expertise in space robotics thinks it could happen sooner rather than later. And that has implications for SETI.