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.
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…
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…
If an asteroid were closing in on our planet, we’d know about it quickly thanks to a dedicated network of astronomers. But this week, the Near Earth Object Coordination Center (NEOCC) had its eyes fixed on something else: two Mars-bound spacecraft attempting to escape Earth’s gravity well. And they did a bang-up job…
It’d be such a shame to lose this fragile, watery planet to an asteroid strike. NASA’s newly-formalized Planetary Defense Coordination Office will do its best to save us — money and physics permitting.
Fresh off the heels of Spooky the Halloween Asteroid comes news of yet another celestial object coming to pay us a visit during an important calendar event. But have no fear, this space rock won’t be the Grinch that annihilated Christmas.
On All Hallow’s Eve, an asteroid dubbed “Spooky” will make its closest approach to our planet. Hurtling along at an impressive 78,830 miles per hour, the 1,300-foot-wide object poses no threat to Earth...or does it? This Gizmodo video explains Spooky’s story.
We can expect a totally different kind of trick-or-treater this coming Halloween. A rather large asteroid—discovered less than three weeks ago—is set to to fly past the Earth at a distance not seen in nearly a decade.
On Friday, asteroid 2014-YB35 is expected to make its closest approach to Earth. Traveling at over 23,000 mph (37,000 km/h), NASA says the 6.2 mile (1,000 meter) asteroid won't get any closer than 2.7-million miles (4.4 million km). That's nearly 12 times the distance from Earth to the Moon – so relax.
Measuring 250 miles (400 km) wide, the now-buried crater in Australia was ground zero for a cataclysmic impact that occurred some 300 million years ago. But is it really the largest on Earth?
A stellar orange dwarf has a 90% chance of passing through the outer reaches of our solar system no earlier than a quarter of a million years from now. Sure, that's a long way off, but this unwelcome guest could perturb the Oort cloud, flinging dangerous comets towards Earth.
Around 3.26 billion years ago — long before the dinosaurs — a massive asteroid measuring nearly 36 miles (58 km) across smashed into the Earth. Geologists have now reconstructed this cataclysmic event, and it was far, far bigger than we thought. Here's how things went down on that fateful day.
Behold the peanut-shaped Asteroid 2006 DP14, a 1,300-foot (400-meter) long object that recently flew past Earth. The asteroid was scanned with Doppler radar — a tried-and-true technology that's helping astronomers pinpoint potentially dangerous near-Earth objects.
Last night, a giant asteroid was supposed to streak by the Earth, close enough for us to catch a glimpse as it zipped by. Except it never showed, and now astronomers say they have no idea just where the 900-foot asteroid has gone.
Today, we got some hard numbers on the asteroids, comets and other objects whizzing through space near Earth.
Mark August 26th, 2032 on your calendar, folks. Ukrainian astronomers have just detected a 1,350-foot-wide (410 meter) minor planet that’s headed our way. The impact risk is minimal, but it’s now the most serious near-term celestial threat to face our planet.
If a near-Earth object happened to come hurtling dangerously close to Earth, the manned mission to gather samples from the captured object might look something like this.
Bill Nye teamed up with Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown of AsapSCIENCE to address one of the most pressing not-if-but-when questions in recent memory: how do we stop a major asteroid from colliding with Earth?
With all the recent buzz over asteroid AD14, the meteor over Chelyabinsk, the fragments of meteorite recovered in Russia's Ural mountains, and yesterday's news that the fireball originated from our solar system's asteroid belt, one can't help but wonder: what's the difference between all these -oids, -ors and -ites?…
