Asteroids Archives

October 12, 2023October 12, 2023 by Evan Gough

OSIRIS-REx Returned Carbon and Water from Asteroid Bennu

This is the outside of the OSIRIS-REx sample collector. Sample material from asteroid Bennu is on the middle right. There's evidence of carbon and water in the initial analysis of Bennu's regolith. Most of the sample is sealed inside the capsule. Photo: NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold

Carbon and water are so common on Earth that they’re barely worth mentioning. But not if you’re a scientist. They know that carbon and water are life-enabling chemicals and are also links to the larger cosmos.

Initial results from OSIRIS-REx’s Bennu samples show the presence of both in the asteroid’s regolith. Now, eager scientists will begin to piece together how Bennu’s carbon, water, and other molecules fit into the puzzle of the Earth, the Sun, and even the entire Solar System and beyond.

October 4, 2023October 4, 2023 by Evan Gough

Watch OSIRIS-REx Release its Sample Capsule

This is the OSIRIS-Rex sample return capsule in the Great Salt Lake Desert. It's charred and blackened from its plunge through Earth's atmosphere. Image Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber

Most of the spacecraft we send out into the Solar System are never meant to return. Time, space, and entropy overtake them, or else they’re purposely sent crashing to their doom at the end of their missions. But not OSIRIS-REx. Its mission was only a success when it returned to Earth with its rare cargo.

September 27, 2023September 27, 2023 by Matt Williams

NASA Opens the Lid on OSIRIS-REx's Sample Capsule

OSIRIS REx Asteroid Sample Return lid opening at Building 31 Astromaterials Curation Facility at the Johnson Space Center. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz

On Sunday, September 23rd, the Sample Retrieval Capsule (SRC) from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission landed in the Utah desert. Shortly thereafter, recovery teams arrived in helicopters, inspected and secured the samples, and flew them to the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). On Monday, the sample canister was transferred to the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate (ARES) in Houston, Texas. Yesterday, on Tuesday, September 26th, NASA announced that the process of unsealing and removing the samples from the canister had begun with the removal of the initial lid.

September 12, 2023September 12, 2023 by Evan Gough

Lucy Has its First Asteroid Target in the Crosshairs

This image shows the tiny main-belt asteroid Dinkinesh. Lucy captured this image from 23 million km away. Image Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft launched almost one year ago, in October of 2021. Its journey is an ambitious one, and long. It’ll visit eight different asteroids in its planned 12-year mission. Two of them are main belt asteroids, and the other six are Jupiter Trojans, which share the gas giant’s orbit around the Sun.

Lucy’s first, and smallest, target asteroid is now in the spacecraft’s sights.

September 8, 2023September 12, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

DART Had a Surprising Impact on its Target

This Hubble image shows debris from Dimorphos about one day after NASA's DART spacecraft slammed into it. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Li (PSI)

After NASA’s DART mission slammed into asteroid Dimorphous in September 2022, scientists determined the impact caused tons of rock to be ejected from the small asteroid’s surface. But more importantly, DART’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbital period, decreasing it by about 33 minutes.

However, a group of researchers measured the orbital period about a month later and discovered that it had increased to 34 minutes — 1 minute longer than the first measurements. Even though it was a single impact from DART, some force continued to slow the asteroid’s orbit, and astronomers don’t yet know what that mechanism might be.

August 17, 2023August 17, 2023 by Andy Tomaswick

The Largest Impact Crater on Earth, 520 km Across, Might Be Hiding Under Australia

Asteroid impacts have arguably killed off more species than almost any other type of disaster since life began on Earth. The most famous of these, the Chicxulub impactor, killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, along with 76% of all species on the planet at the time. But that was by no means the worst disaster; as far as we can tell, it wasn’t even the biggest asteroid. That title currently goes to the Vredefort crater in South Africa. Coming in at over 300 kilometers wide, it was the largest asteroid crater so far found, at least when it was formed about 2 billion years ago. But that might be about to change if a theory from Andrew Glikson and Tony Yeates of New South Wales is correct. They have found what they believe to be the biggest impact crater on Earth since the Late Heavy Bombardment in their own Australian province of New South Wales, and they think it might have caused one of the other five mass extinction events.

August 8, 2023August 8, 2023 by Andy Tomaswick

A New Paper Shows How To Change An Asteroid Into A Space Habitat – In Just 12 Years

The basic idea of turning an asteroid into a rotating space habitat has existed for a while. Despite that, it’s always seemed relatively far off regarding technologies, so the concept hasn’t received much attention over the years. But, if you’re retired and have an underlying interest in researching space habitats, developing a detailed plan for turning an asteroid into one seems like a great use of time. And that is precisely what David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, recently did. He released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat.

August 6, 2023August 6, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

Some Metal Meteorites Have a Tiny Magnetic Field. But How?

Illustration of the metallic asteroid Psyche. Credit: Peter Rubin/NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

One of the striking things about iron meteorites is that they are often magnetic. The magnetism isn’t strong, but it holds information about their origin. This is why astronomers discourage meteorite hunters from using magnets to distinguish meteorites from the surrounding rock, since hand magnets can erase the magnetic history of a meteorite, which is an important scientific record.

July 31, 2023July 31, 2023 by Andy Tomaswick

Computer Algorithm Finds a “Potentially Hazardous” Asteroid

Humanity has been on an asteroid-finding spree as of late. Those close to Earth, known as Near Earth Objects (NEOs), have been particularly interesting for two reasons. One is they offer potentially lucrative economic opportunities with asteroid mining. The other is they are potentially devastating if they hit the Earth, so we’d like to find them with some advance warning. Those that fall into the latter category are known as potentially hazardous asteroids, or PHAs. Now, thanks to some ingenious programmers from the University of Washington, we have a new algorithm to detect them.

July 26, 2023July 26, 2023 by Andy Tomaswick

Need To Image An Asteroid Close Up? There’s an AMIGO For That.

There are so many asteroids. Just in our own backyard, we’ve found over 30,000 Near Earth asteroids. Exploring them using traditional methods and launching a custom-made mission, like Hayabusa or OSIRIS-REx, would almost certainly be cost-prohibitive. So how can we assess whether they would make good targets for early asteroid mining missions? Ground imaging can help, but there’s nothing like being on-site on one of these asteroids to get a sense of what they are made of. Those visits would be much easier if we mass-produced the Asteroid Mobile Imager and Geologic Observer (AMIGO).