NASA's DART mission—Double Asteroid Redirection Test—was humanity's first real-world planetary defense mission.
Astronomy
Jul 31, 2024
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Sometimes, science requires traveling into hazardous environments; sometimes it requires a vast influx of state capital and an army of researchers and technicians. But sometimes, science has to call in the Marines. We reported ...
A team of astronomers at Nanjing University has found evidence that Mars likely has more potentially hazardous asteroids in its path than Earth. In their study, posted on the arXiv preprint server, the group investigated ...
The author of a disaster novel couldn't have dreamed it up any better: On a Friday, the thirteenth of all days, the potentially dangerous asteroid (99942) Apophis will come extremely close to humanity.
Planetary Sciences
May 8, 2024
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Ever want to play a game of cosmic billiards? That's commonly how the DART mission was described when it successfully changed the orbit of a near-Earth asteroid last year. If you want an idea of how it works, just Google ...
Space Exploration
Nov 30, 2023
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Last September, NASA purposefully smashed a spacecraft into Dimorphos, a 160m-wide space rock orbiting a larger asteroid named Didymos. The goal of the mission, called DART (the Double Asteroid Redirection Test), was to demonstrate ...
Planetary Sciences
Nov 6, 2023
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It is as inevitable as the rising of the sun and the turning of the tides. Someday another large rock from space will crash into the Earth. It has happened for billions of years in the past and will continue to happen for ...
Astronomy
May 18, 2023
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If you surfed the web this morning, you may have seen news of the latest existential threat to humanity: a "planet killer" asteroid named 2022 AP7.
Astronomy
Nov 2, 2022
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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
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A small asteroid hit Earth's atmosphere over the Norwegian Sea before disintegrating on March 11, 2022. But this event wasn't a complete surprise: Astronomers knew it was on a collision course, predicting exactly where and ...
Space Exploration
Mar 15, 2022
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