Like a shelf in an old house, the Earth collects a lot of dust from its surroundings. This "space dust" is mostly made up of micrometeorites that survive atmospheric entry and provides researchers with a cheap and easy way ...
The moon is not the only natural object traveling through space alongside Earth. Several small asteroids travel around the sun in near lockstep with our planet. And just like Earth, these space rocks also take a year to complete ...
When a bright fireball streaked across the Alaska sky last spring, the usual tools scientists rely on to track such events—cameras and satellites—did not provide a detailed picture. But the meteoroid left behind something ...
Life on Earth took a long evolutionary journey that eventually created us, the purportedly intelligent species that dominates the planet. But there was no grand plan or design, only happenstance, nature and luck. Life on ...
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists studying the inner main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson have found that its rotation wobbles. Rather than rolling through space in a steady pattern, Donaldjohanson turns on two ...
The first few billion years of Earth's history saw the rise of life, the atmosphere and the oceans. Still, that time is shrouded in mystery: Not many rocks remain that preserve a record of those early iterations of our modern ...
A sonic boom shook Boston and the larger New England area with the force of 230 tons of TNT. The source came from outer space. The Saturday afternoon event triggered shock waves online, with thousands inquiring what could ...
MIT engineers are testing a new propulsion system that combines the power and speed of conventional chemical thrusters with the precision and fuel-efficiency of electrical thrusters. The system could enable the design of ...
SpaceX seems to have mistaken shooting for the moon with shooting at the moon. Forecast to occur on Aug. 5, a five-story-long piece of a rocket from one of the private space exploration company's recent lunar missions is ...
Earth has a group of cosmic stalkers. Known as "co-orbitals," these small bits of rock have a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth. Basically, they take the exact same amount of time to orbit the sun as we do. Astronomers ...
