The US space agency counted down Thursday to its first mission to collect dust from an asteroid, the kind of cosmic body that may have delivered life-giving materials to Earth billions of years ago.
(Phys.org)—A trio of researchers is suggesting that a meteorite retrieved from the surface of a frozen lake in Canada may have come from the Kuiper belt—which if true, would be the first to be so identified. In their ...
NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will launch September 2016 and travel to a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu to harvest a sample of surface material and return it to Earth for study. The science team will be looking for something ...
On May 4, 1976, NASA launched a cannonball-shaped satellite that transformed studies of Earth's shape, rotation and gravity field.
I love anything that attempts to provide a sense of scale about the Solar System (see here and here for even more examples) and this one brings us down past the Sun, planets, and moons all the way to asteroid size—specifically ...
ESO's New Technology Telescope has been used to find the first evidence that asteroids can have a highly varied internal structure. By making measurements astronomers have found that different parts of the asteroid Itokawa ...
Life on Earth or Mars could have been brought to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn on rocks blasted off those planets, researchers say.
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded ...
The recent meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk brought to the forefront a topic that has worried astronomers for years, namely that an impactor from space could cause widespread human fatalities. Indeed, the thousand+ injured ...
Bong Wie has heard the snickers. You want to protect the Earth from asteroids? Where were you when the dinosaurs needed you? You want to be like Bruce Willis in that asteroid movie?
