Asteroids
A 500-Meter-Long Asteroid Flew Past Earth, and Astronomers Were Watching
An asteroid the size of the Empire State Building flew past Earth in early February, coming within 1.8 million km…
ESA is Building an Early Warning System for Dangerous Asteroids
The European Space Agency is working on a new mission that would act as an early warning system for dangerous,…
A Green Bank Telescope Prototype Radar System Can Image the Moon in High-Resolution and Detect Asteroids
Everyone loves taking pictures of the Moon. Whether it’s with their phones or through the wonders of astrophotography, photographing the…
JWST Unexpectedly Finds a Small Asteroid During ‘Failed’ Observations
While astronomers and engineers were trying to calibrate one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s instruments last summer, they serendipitously…
Don’t Bother Trying to Destroy Rubble Pile Asteroids
The asteroids in our Solar System are survivors. They've withstood billions of years of collisions. The surviving asteroids are divided…
The Outer Solar System Supplied a Surprising Amount of Earth’s Water
In a recent study published in Science, a team of researchers at Imperial College London examined 18 meteorites containing the…
Lucy Adds Another Asteroid to its Flyby List
In October 2021, NASA launched its ambitious Lucy mission. Its targets are asteroids, two in the main belt and eight…
Asteroids Didn’t Create the Moon’s Largest Craters. Left-Over Planetesimals Did
The Moon's pock-marked surface tells the story of its history. It's marked by over 9,000 impact craters, according to the…
What Would Asteroid Mining do to the World's Economy?
A new study by a team of Chinese researchers examines the impact asteroid mining with have on global equity.
Three New Potentially Hazardous Asteroids Discovered, Including a big one That Measures 1.5 km Across
An asteroid 1.5 km across is no joke. Even a much smaller one, about the size of a house, can…