A few NASA-funded astronomer teams are always on the hunt for potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them within 30 million miles of Earth's orbit. At NASA, the Planetary ...
Space Exploration
Aug 2, 2017
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On the first day of the year 1801, Italian astronomer Gioacchino Giuseppe Maria Ubaldo Nicolò Piazzi found a previously uncharted "tiny star" near the constellation of Taurus. The following night Piazzi again observed this ...
Space Exploration
Jun 30, 2017
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A leading astrophysicist from Queen's University Belfast has warned that an asteroid strike is just a matter of time.
Space Exploration
Jun 20, 2017
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NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, ...
Space Exploration
Jun 5, 2017
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A peanut-shaped asteroid 1.3 kilometres (3,280 feet) across streaked past Earth on Wednesday, giving astronomers a rare chance to check out a big space rock up close.
Space Exploration
Apr 19, 2017
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A relatively large near-Earth asteroid discovered nearly three years ago will fly safely past Earth on April 19 at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth ...
Space Exploration
Apr 7, 2017
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Radar images of asteroid 2017 BQ6 were obtained on Feb. 6 and 7 with NASA's 70-meter (230-foot) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. They reveal an irregular, angular-appearing asteroid ...
Space Exploration
Feb 13, 2017
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A NASA spacecraft begins its search Thursday for an enigmatic class of near-Earth objects known as Earth-Trojan asteroids. OSIRIS-REx, currently on a two-year outbound journey to the asteroid Bennu, will spend almost two ...
Space Exploration
Feb 10, 2017
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NASA's NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another—definitely a comet—might be seen with binoculars ...
Space Exploration
Dec 29, 2016
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405
Astronomers have obtained observations of the smallest asteroid ever characterized in detail. At 2 meters (6 feet) in diameter, the tiny space rock is small enough to be straddled by a person in a hypothetical space-themed ...
Space Exploration
Nov 30, 2016
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