Early tomorrow, a small asteroid will zip past Earth well inside the Moon’s orbit. NASA says poses no threat, but astronomers around the world will use the opportunity to test the international community’s ability to detect and track potentially dangerous objects.
Asteroid mining—which may be necessary to get the human species off its only rock—has inched closer to reality over the last few years. Last week, asteroid mining groups joined with scientists at the European Planetary Science Congress 2017 (EPSC2017) hosted in Riga, Latvia, to present some key findings of the current…
Is it an asteroid? A comet? Both? Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope are revealing new details about a strange binary asteroid that’s performing double-duty as a comet. It’s the first time scientists have ever seen such a thing.
Around 36 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. New research suggests that, for a brief time, the temperature at the point of impact exceeded 4,300 degrees F (2,370 C), making it the hottest temperature known to have occurred on Earth.
Something just popped into one NASA telescope’s view, and it isn’t a star or a meteor—it’s one of our spacecraft. It’s hurtling towards planet Earth right now.
Oh Florence, we really needed you this month. There’s a petulant species of brainy monkeys apes that just can’t seem to get along that probably deserves to be completely wiped out in a fiery collision. But there you go, flying right on by.
For billions of years, the Solar System’s asteroids have been involved in an endless game of bumper cars, smashing into each other and splintering into smaller bits. But get this—astronomers have just detected a clump of asteroids that has managed, quite miraculously, to stay intact since they first formed some four…
Microscopic tardigrades, also known as “water bears,” are the toughest animals on the planet, capable of withstanding intense radiation, extreme temperatures, and even the vacuum of space. In a fascinating new study, researchers have shown that tardigrades are poised to survive literally anything that nature throws at…
Frogs have been around for nearly 200 million years, but it wasn’t until a 10-mile-wide asteroid struck our planet, wiping out three-quarters of all life on Earth—including the dinosaurs—that these crafty amphibians were able to make their big evolutionary move, according to new research.
A mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique just got a NASA promotion to the design phase. Called DART, the plan would see a refrigerator-sized spacecraft smash into a non-threatening asteroid, causing it to move ever so slightly from its original orbital path. The project is seen as an important first…
Every few months, a journalist asks a scientist about the looming threat of Armageddon. That scientist’s quotes are then predictably blown out of proportion and turned into some iteration of “The End Is Nigh.” In light of Asteroid Day, which is today, we’d like to clarify some of the apocalyptic misinformation that’s…
Four years ago, an asteroid the size of a city bus screamed across the skies of Chelyabinsk, Russia, shattering glass around a 60 mile perimeter and sending 1,200 people to hospitals with related injuries. In an effort to learn more about these rare but dangerous encounters with objects from space, NASA has used a…
Most asteroids orbit the Sun in a counterclockwise fashion, but a newly-discovered object nicknamed Bee-Zed goes against the grain, spinning around the Solar System the opposite way. Not only that, it frequently ventures within Jupiter’s orbital space—putting it on a potential collision course with the gas giant and…
Humans are rightly terrified by the threat of nuclear war, but there’s also a non-zero chance that a giant rock will come hurling through our atmosphere to ruin every Earthling’s day. When that happened 66 million years ago, it triggered a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But we have something the…
Here’s a cheery thought to send you into the weekend: New research suggests that the greatest danger posed by an incoming asteroid is not from the cataclysmic impact of it striking the Earth—but from the enormous shockwave it produces when it enters the atmosphere.
Right now, OSIRIS-REx is one of the busiest spacecrafts in the solar system. OSIRIS-REx, which blasted off in September 2016, has been getting ready to rendezvous with the object of its mission—an asteroid called Bennu—in order to bring back samples to Earth. But before the spacecraft links up with Bennu in 2018, it’s…
Earth has some battle scars from back in the day. When the solar system was still young and wild, roughly 4 billion years ago, Earth, its Moon, and Mars were attacked by a series of asteroid assailants. It’s long been assumed that the space rocks involved in the assault—called the Late Heavy Bombardment—are now…
In addition to its 67 moons, Jupiter is accompanied by two giant clusters of asteroids that orbit the sun along the same path, and is packed with as many large objects as the Asteroid Belt. Yesterday, NASA announced a new mission to investigate these “trojan” asteroids. Here’s what you need to know about this exciting…
Concern over an apocalyptic asteroid strike has risen all the way to the top: The White House released a document this week detailing a strategy for National Near Earth Object (NEO) preparedness. Morgan Freeman would no doubt be proud, although honestly, the nation might have more pressing apocalypse concerns closer…
This year sucked, didn’t it?
