Mine those asteroids: Strathclyde team finds easy 12

(Phys.org) —Researchers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow have identified twelve easily retrievable objects among the population of near earth objects (NEOs). In their paper published this month in Celestial Mechanics ...

School bus-size asteroid to safely zoom past Earth

A small near-Earth asteroid (or NEA) will briefly visit Earth's neighborhood on Thursday, Sept. 24, zooming past at a distance of about 13,000 miles (22,000 kilometers) above our planet's surface. The asteroid will make its ...

Meteorite just one piece of an unknown celestial body

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from all over the world are taking a second, more expansive, look at the car-sized asteroid that exploded over Sudan's Nubian Desert in 2008. Initial research was focused on classifying the meteorite ...

Twenty years of planetary defense

On March 11, 1998, asteroid astronomers around the world received an ominous message: new observational data on the recently discovered asteroid 1997 XF11 suggested there was a chance that the half-mile-wide (nearly one kilometer) ...

Large, distant comets more common than previously thought

Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never ...

NASA office to coordinate asteroid detection, hazard mitigation

NASA has formalized its ongoing program for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs) as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). The office remains within NASA's Planetary Science Division, in the agency's ...

Ten thousandth near-Earth object unearthed in space

(Phys.org) —More than 10,000 asteroids and comets that can pass near Earth have now been discovered. The 10,000th near-Earth object, asteroid 2013 MZ5, was first detected on the night of June 18, 2013, by the Pan-STARRS-1 ...

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