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 ...

Image: Tunguska devastation

Fallen trees at Tunguska, Imperial Russia, seen in 1929, 15 km from epicentre of aerial blast site, caused by explosion of a meteor in 1908 (Photo N. A. Setrukov, 1928).

What it takes to discover small rocks in space

Once every month, on average, somewhere on Earth a fireball appears out of nowhere and for mere seconds, casts a blinding flash across the sky before it blows up in a thunderous explosion. It happened last Saturday over southern ...

Tracking the threat of asteroids and comets

In 1994, astronomers watched in awe as the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into the planet Jupiter, creating massive fireballs exploding with the force of six million megatons of TNT—equivalent to 600 times the world's nuclear ...

Four years of NASA NEOWISE data

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its fourth year of survey data. Since the mission was restarted in December 2013, after a period of hibernation, the asteroid- and ...

Asteroid tracking network observes close approach

On Oct. 12 EDT (Oct. 11 PDT), a small asteroid designated 2012 TC4 will safely pass by Earth at a distance of approximately 26,000 miles (42,000 kilometers). This is a little over one tenth the distance to the moon and just ...

page 6 from 8