30,000 near-Earth asteroids discovered, and numbers are rising

We have now discovered 30,039 near-Earth asteroids in the solar system—rocky bodies orbiting the sun on a path that brings them close to Earth's orbit. The majority of these were discovered in the last decade, showing how ...

Looking up at the asteroids in the neighborhood

Asteroids fly through our solar system all the time, but it's rare for us to take notice of them. But that's changed this week, as an asteroid passes within 1,231,184 miles of Earth on January 18. The asteroid, dubbed 7482 ...

Two teams report on study of Hayabusa2 asteroid samples

Two teams of researchers are publishing their findings thus far after initial study of samples collected from the asteroid Ryugu and returned to Earth last year by the Japanese space probe Hayabusa2. Both teams are large ...

Near-earth asteroid might be a lost fragment of the moon

A near-Earth asteroid named Kamo`oalewa could be a fragment of our moon, according to a new paper published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona.

Asteroid sample brought back to Earth gets close-up look

In December 2020, Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft swung by Earth to drop off a cache of rock samples taken from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. Asteroids like Ryugu are thought to represent the ancient building blocks of ...

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