Asteroids
Asteroids Crashing Into Dead Stars are Helping Explain Where the Universe’s Missing Lithium Went
What happened to all the lithium? The question has stumped astronomers for decades. While cosmologists have successfully predicted the abundance…
Japan’s Hayabusa 2 Probe Drops Off Bits of an Asteroid and Heads for Its Next Target
Japan's Hayabusa 2 probe zoomed past Earth on December 5th and dropped off a capsule containing bits of an asteroid,…
There Might Be Water On All Rocky Planets
If you asked someone who was reasonably scientifically literate how Earth got its water, they'd likely tell you it came…
New Scans Give us a Better View of the Metal Asteroid Psyche
In 2022, NASA will launch a spacecraft to asteroid Psyche (16 Psyche), one of the largest in the asteroid belt,…
Success! OSIRIS-REx Touches Asteroid Bennu to Collect Samples
Out in the asteroid belt, 207 million miles (334 million km) from Earth, a little spacecraft briefly touched down on…
We Might Have a New Mini-Moon Soon
Is it a new asteroid mini--moon or a human-made mini-moon? That’s the question about a small object approaching Earth, called…
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…
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…