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On a distant space rock being explored by a NASA probe, days are slowly shortening — and scientists are still trying to figure out why.Right now, the asteroid known as Bennu is spinning once every 4.3 hours. But scientists working on NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission to the space rock have used data gathered before the probe's arrival to calculate that Bennu's rotation rate is speeding up over time — by about 1 second each century."As it speeds up, things ought to change, and so we're going to be looking for those things and detecting this speed up gives us some clues...

Sorry Hollywood, it’s Going to Take a Lot More to Destroy an Asteroid It’s become something of an action movie cliche: an asteroid is hurling towards Earth, its impact will cause a mass extinction, and the only hope for humanity is a ragtag group of astronauts and average Joes who will fly to the asteroid and blow it to pieces using nukes. The idea has been explored so many times by Hollywood that it seems like this is actually something space agencies have planned. And in truth, they are, though the execution may be a little more sophisticated. For decades,...

A Japanese asteroid probe has grabbed its first space-rock sample. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully nabbed bits of the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) asteroid Ryugu today (Feb. 21; Feb. 22 Japan time), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) officials announced. Hayabusa2 spiraled down to Ryugu's surface, fired a 0.2-ounce (5 grams) tantalum "bullet" into the boulder-strewn rock at close range, and collected pieces of the ejected material using its specialized "sampling horn," JAXA officials said during a press conference this evening. … Hayabusa2's main goal is to help scientists better understand the solar system's early history and evolution, as well as the role...

This computer graphic image provided by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) shows the Japanese unmanned spacecraft Hayabusa2 approaching on the asteroid Ryugu. Hayabusa2 is approaching the surface of an asteroid about 280 million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth. The JAXA said Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019 that Hayabusa2 began its approach at 1:15 p.m. =================================================================== A Japanese spacecraft began its approach Thursday toward a distant asteroid on a mission to collect material that could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on Earth. Hayabusa2's descent was delayed for about five hours for a safety check,...

The English tabloid Express ran a story today (Feb. 11) with the headline "NASA warn 'APOCALYPSE asteroid' Bennu WILL appear in the sky this Valentine's Day." The piece claimed that the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid Bennu — "a doomsday asteroid which has a high probability of impacting Earth in one hundred years time" — will be "visible to the naked eye" on the night of Feb. 14, slightly to the right of Mars. This is entirely wrong. First of all, Bennu is not an "apocalypse asteroid," and NASA never labeled it such. (Agency scientists aren't known for their hyperbolic and...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) spacecraft has obtained new images of Bennu, a 1,614-foot (492 m) wide asteroid that orbits the Sun relatively close to the Earth.

Several telescopes livestreamed the entire eclipse, and multiple people caught a glimpse of a small flash of light, seeming to come from around Lagrange crater. Because this event was seen by multiple observers separated by thousands of miles, the only conclusion is that something hit the moon, and its impact event was recorded on video. ...Further investigation will be necessary to determine the size of the meteoroid and obtain pictures of its impact crater, but for a basis of comparison, the LCROSS mission plowed a Centaur upper stage (2.2 tons) into the lunar surface at 2.5 km/s. This should have...

"As it turns out, the eclipse was even more special than most observers had noticed, as the Moon was actually struck by a meteorite while everyone was gazing in wonder at its rusty appearance. The meteorite itself wasn’t terribly large, and is estimated to have only been around 22 pounds. Still, its impact was large enough to be spotted by observers as well as the automated MIDAS system, and that’s pretty cool." I caught it as well with my own equipment. The impact flash appears at 1:23:04 in my video at about the 8 o'clock position near the edge of...

Asteroids have been hitting the Earth for nearly 1 billion years, but the atmosphere has largely shielded the planet from some catastrophic events. However, some space rocks make their way through — including the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. But a new study notes that, over the past 290 million years, asteroids have been impacting the Earth at triple the rate they were previously and scientists aren't sure why. After looking at 1 billion years' worth of asteroid impacts on both the Earth and Moon, researchers found that dinosaurs' fate was perhaps an inevitability.

DART's target Didymos was chosen based on very different criteria. It's a binary asteroid, which means DART can slam into the smaller object of the pair. But scientists can gather robust data about the bodies and their locations from Earth, which will help them track where to target the car-size spacecraft as well as how much the collision knocked the object off course.

1. We have absolutely no idea where it came from 2. We don't really know what it looks like ...tumbling through space and appears to be, more or less, cigar-shaped.... about 10 times longer than its width. ..object's brightness (or amount of reflected sunlight) varied by a factor of 10 every eight hours or so. This strongly implies that 'Oumuamua has an extremely elongated shape. 3. 'Oumuamua got a little speed boost as it approached us Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories noticed that its acceleration increased which slightly changed its course from what was initially predicted....

Portuguese scientists have found a depression on the Atlantic Ocean floor they think may be an impact crater. The roughly circular, 6km-wide hollow has a broad central dome and has been dubbed the "Fried Egg" because of its distinctive shape. It was detected to the south of the Azores Islands during a survey to map the continental shelf. If the Fried Egg was made by a space impactor, the collision probably took place within the past 17 million years... It lies under 2km of water about 150km from the Azores archipelago. The depressed ring sits roughly 110m below the...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was launched in 2016, but today it will begin to orbit its destination: the asteroid Bennu. When it does, Benniu will break the record for the smallest object ever orbited by a manmade spacecraft. NASA will begin a process of learning more about the small asteroids that reside in our part of the solar system. You can watch the livestream of the arrival here:

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to rendezvous with its targeted asteroid, Bennu, on Monday, December 3, 2018, at approximately 17:00 UTC (noon EST). Translate UTC to your time. NASA will air a live event from 16:45 to 17:15 UTC (11:45 a.m.to 12:15 p.m. EST) to highlight the arrival of the agency’s first asteroid sample return mission. You can watch on NASA TV, Facebook Live, Ustream, YouTube and NASA Live. NASA TV also will air an arrival preview program starting at 16:15 UTC (11:15 a.m. EST). OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) launched in September 2016 and has been...

Three chunky asteroids will zoom by Earth this weekend, and one of them is getting closer to our planet than the moon itself. On Saturday (Nov. 10), the near-Earth asteroid 2018 VX1 will zip within about 236,100 miles (380,000 kilometers) of Earth. That's closer than the moon, which hangs out about 238,900 miles (384,400 km) away as it orbits Earth. Gianluca Masi, founder and director of the Virtual Telescope Project in Italy, which is live-streaming the celestial show online here starting at 1 p.m. EST (18:00 UTC) on Saturday. … People here on Earth will be able to see the...

At around 12.14 in the afternoon, it will come as close as 15 lunar distances, which is 15-times the distance from the Earth to the Moon (or about 3.7 million miles). TWO asteroids are set to drift uncomfortably close to the Earth on Sunday, with the pair of objects passing the planet within five hours of each other. The largest of the asteroids is estimated to have a diameter as long as 120 metres, making it bigger than most football pitches. What's exciting this time around, however, is that the largest (sexily named "2009 WB105") has an estimated diameter of...

http://earth-chronicles.com/space/nasa-budget-increases-due-to-asteroid-threat.html NASA budget increases due to asteroid threat BY SPACE · OCTOBER 18, 2018 The Trump administration proposed tripling the budget for the NASA Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The US budget is bursting at the seams, it is already stretched to the maximum. But Washington is ready to incur additional costs to deal with the threat from space. The Trump administration intends to nearly increase the budget of the NASA space agency, from $ 60 to $ 150 million. And this is due to the fact that humanity is completely unprepared for the fall of a giant asteroid on earth....

TOKYO (AP) — A German-French observation device safely landed on an asteroid on Wednesday after a Japanese spacecraft released it as part of a research effort that could find clues about the origin of the solar system, Japanese space officials said. The Japan Space Exploration Agency said the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout, or MASCOT, was released from the unmanned spacecraft Hayabusa2 and successfully landed on the asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft went as close as about 50 meters (160 feet) to the asteroid’s surface to release the box-shaped lander.

Scientists have uncovered the truth about a mysterious space rock called Oumuamua which has been hurtling through Earth’s solar system and was spotted last year.A group of acclaimed astronomers, including members from NASA, the European Space Agency and the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, released a report this week on the origins of the cigar-shaped asteroid which was first observed in October 2017. The name Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first” and was named by the site who first spotted it. According to the report, “a fast moving object on an unbound orbit was discovered close...

The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid's surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one of the initial images sent home by the hoppers is awfully blurry, since the robot snapped it while still on the go. In order to complete the deployment, the main spacecraft of the Hayabusa2 mission lowered itself carefully down toward the surface until it was just 120 feet (55 meters) up. After the rovers were on their way, the spacecraft raised itself back up to its typical altitude of about 12.5 miles above the asteroid's...