Recent headlines have contained lots of asteroid-nuking talk. There’s a team of Russian scientists zapping mini asteroids in their lab, and supposedly NASA is thinking about a plan that would hypothetically involve nuking Bennu should it threaten Earth in 2135.
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is currently en route to Bennu, a carbon-rich asteroid that could contain the basic building blocks of life. Late last year it collected some images to remind us how small and insignificant we really are.
Right now, NASA’s Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security - Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft is hurtling through the void in order to link up with an asteroid named Bennu in 2018. While the intrepid spacecraft still has a way to go until its big rendezvous, today it’ll casually fly by…
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.
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…
NASA’s asteroid-skimming spacecraft just blasted off into space without a hitch, completing the first step in a seven-year journey that will eventually bring us back several spoonfuls worth of dirt from an asteroid.
Tonight, NASA will send a spacecraft on a seven-year long journey to bring us back some dirt from an asteroid—without ever even landing on it. Watch along with us as it launches at 7:05 pm EDT.
Tomorrow night, an asteroid-bound mission will launch towards a shadowy space rock, Bennu. There, it will scoop up a bit of dirt and deliver it back to us, all without ever attempting a landing. It’s not just any dirt, though. Bound up in these grains could be the answer to how life first emerged here on Earth.
Forty-five years ago today, Apollo 11 launched from Kennedy Space Center on humanity's first crewed mission to the surface of the moon. This view of Earth was captured from Apollo soon after translunar injection, just as the spacecraft was breaking away from our planet's orbit.
NASA has a plan to better explore how our own local star system, and life within it, got started. It wants to intercept, study, and sample a passing asteroid. The only thing more impressive than this mission's astronomical level of precision is how the space agency somehow shoehorned "Origins Spectral Interpretation…
Meet OSIRIS-REx, the NASA probe with the kingly name, which will be the first craft to visit an asteroid and bring pieces back to Earth. The probe, whose name stands for Origins Spectral-Interpretation Resource-Identification Security Regolith Explorer, launches in 2016.
