After seven years in space and over 4 billion miles traveled, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully collected and delivered the first U.S. sample from a near-Earth asteroid. Yet, after all this time and travel, the spacecraft ...
Space Exploration
Nov 1, 2023
0
215
Large-scale sky surveys are set to revolutionize astronomy. Observatories such as Vera Rubin and others will allow astronomers to observe how the sky changes on the scale of days, not weeks or months. They will be able to ...
Astronomy
Nov 1, 2023
0
20
NASA's Lucy mission will soon have its first asteroid encounter as the spacecraft travels through deep space en route to Jupiter's orbit. But before the spacecraft passes 265 miles (425 kilometers) from the surface of the ...
Astronomy
Oct 30, 2023
0
145
In July of this year, an asteroid roughly 30 to 60 meters across passed Earth to within one-quarter of the distance to the moon. It posed no threat to our world, but if it had struck Earth it would have created a blast three ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 30, 2023
0
13
For centuries, the quest for new elements was a driving force in many scientific disciplines. Understanding an atom's structure and the development of nuclear science allowed scientists to accomplish the old goal of alchemists—turning ...
Space Exploration
Oct 27, 2023
1
129
Two teams of economists have conducted economic assessments of mining asteroids—one of them is a trio with one member each from the University of Tor Rome Vergata, the University of Maryland and Middlebury College. They ...
Everyone likes a cool infographic, right? Does that statement hold even if the infographic points out a gap in our knowledge that could kill millions of people? Because that's what a cool-looking infographic NASA released ...
Planetary Sciences
Oct 20, 2023
0
22
NASA's Lucy spacecraft is preparing for its first close-up look at an asteroid. On Nov. 1, it will fly by asteroid Dinkinesh and test its instruments in preparation for visits in the next decade to multiple Trojan asteroids ...
Space Exploration
Oct 19, 2023
0
55
Psyche was the Greek goddess of the soul, born a mere mortal and later married to Eros, the God of love. Who knows why the Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis gave her name to a celestial object he observed one night ...
Space Exploration
Oct 18, 2023
0
13
One of the most exciting findings from NASA's Dawn mission is that Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter, hosts complex organics. The discovery of aliphatic molecules, which consist ...
Astrobiology
Oct 16, 2023
0
271
