Twenty years ago, the U.S. Congress instructed NASA to find 90% of near-Earth asteroids threatening Earth. They've made progress finding these asteroids that orbit the sun and come to within 1.3 astronomical units of Earth. ...
Planetary Sciences
May 26, 2025
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80
Tracking exoplanets via orbital mechanics isn't easy. Plenty of variables could affect how a planet moves around its star, and determining which ones affect any given exoplanet requires a lot of data and a lot of modeling.
Astronomy
May 20, 2025
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46
On March 15 at 8:15 p.m. Beijing time (March 14 at 8:42 p.m. EDT; 5:42 p.m. PDT), China launched two satellites atop a Yuanzheng-1S mounted on a Long March-2C rocket. While the first and second stages were successful, a technical ...
Space Exploration
Apr 23, 2025
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60
Why do comets and their meteoroid streams weave in and out of Earth's orbit and their orbits disperse over time? In a paper published in the journal Icarus, two SETI Institute researchers show that this is not due to the ...
Astronomy
Apr 16, 2025
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87
A combination of cosmic processes shapes the formation of one of the most common types of planets outside of our solar system, according to a new study led by researchers at Penn State. The research team used data from NASA's ...
Astronomy
Mar 17, 2025
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29
Last year, astronomers detected the near-earth asteroid (NEA) 2024 YR4, which orbits the sun every four years and periodically crosses Earth's orbit. The nature of its orbit makes it a potentially hazardous object (PHO), ...
Planetary Sciences
Mar 11, 2025
1
145
The shape of a planet's orbit is one of its fundamental properties, along with its size and distance from its host star. Earth has a nearly circular orbit, but some planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, have ...
Planetary Sciences
Mar 5, 2025
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123
We all know that asteroids are out there, that some of them come dangerously close to Earth, and that they've struck Earth before with catastrophic consequences. The recent discovery of asteroid 2024 YR4 reminds us of the ...
Astronomy
Feb 17, 2025
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53
Ever since Isaac Newton famously talked about gravity, its dominance as a force in our solar system has been well known. It's responsible for the orbits of the planets and their satellites, but there are other forces that ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 27, 2025
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545
The ISS's orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, ...
Space Exploration
Jan 21, 2025
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