Asteroid dust collected by a Japanese space probe contains organic material that shows some of the building blocks of life on Earth may have been formed in space, scientists said Friday.
Planetary Sciences
Jun 12, 2022
0
336
After a six-year journey, a plucky spacecraft called Hayabusa2 zinged back into Earth's atmosphere in late 2020 and landed deep in the Australian outback. When researchers from the Japanese space agency JAXA opened it, they ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 9, 2022
3
762
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) Hayabusa2 mission returned uncontaminated primitive asteroid samples to Earth. A comprehensive analysis of 16 particles from the asteroid Ryugu revealed many insights into the ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 9, 2022
0
126
Watching the skies for large asteroids that could pose a hazard to Earth is a global endeavor. So, to test their operational readiness, the international planetary defense community will sometimes use a real asteroid's close ...
Astronomy
May 31, 2022
1
184
In our solar system, there are several thousand examples of co-orbital objects: bodies that share the same orbit around the sun or a planet. The Trojan asteroids are such an example. We have not yet observed any similar co-orbitals ...
Astronomy
May 26, 2022
0
45
A "potentially hazardous" asteroid measuring more than a mile long will zoom past Earth this week, the largest asteroid expected to get relatively close to our planet in 2022.
Astronomy
May 24, 2022
1
1028
It might be hard to fathom now, but the human exploration of the solar system isn't going to stop at the moon and Mars. Eventually, our descendants will spread throughout the solar system—for those interested in space exploration, ...
Space Exploration
May 24, 2022
1
27
Before the Earth and other planets formed, the young sun was still surrounded by cosmic gas and dust. Over the millennia, rock fragments of various sizes formed from the dust. Many of these became building blocks for the ...
Astronomy
May 24, 2022
3
349
When Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres in 1801, he thought it was a planet. Astronomers didn't know about asteroids at that time. Now we know there's an enormous quantity of them, primarily residing in the ...
Astronomy
May 19, 2022
0
133
Off-earth mining may once have been purely the stuff of science fiction, but now it's potentially a US$1 trillion industry that is likely to be vital if humans are serious about colonizing Mars or the moon.
Space Exploration
May 12, 2022
0
58
