Related topics: earth · nasa · asteroid

Large, distant comets more common than previously thought

Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never ...

How a speck of light becomes an asteroid

On the first day of the year 1801, Italian astronomer Gioacchino Giuseppe Maria Ubaldo Nicolò Piazzi found a previously uncharted "tiny star" near the constellation of Taurus. The following night Piazzi again observed this ...

NASA's asteroid-hunting spacecraft a discovery machine

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, ...

Asteroid to fly safely past Earth on April 19

A relatively large near-Earth asteroid discovered nearly three years ago will fly safely past Earth on April 19 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth ...

NEOWISE mission spies one comet, maybe two

NASA's NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another—definitely a comet—might be seen with binoculars ...

More than 15,000 near-Earth objects and counting

The international effort to find, confirm and catalogue the multitude of asteroids that pose a threat to our planet has reached a milestone: 15 000 discovered – with many more to go.

Small asteroid is Earth's constant companion

A small asteroid has been discovered in an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth, and it will remain so for centuries to come.

Asteroid-hunting spacecraft delivers a second year of data

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013. ...

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