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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A U.S. space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said on Tuesday. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to dispatch the robot explorer Osiris-Rex on a seven-year mission. United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Osiris-Rex is headed to a 1,640-foot (500-meter) wide asteroid named Bennu, which circles the...

Paging Bruce Willis! NASA is planning to launch a probe to study an asteroid that could one day pulverize the Earth. The asteroid, named Bennu, crosses Earth’s orbit once every six years and has gotten ever closer since it was discovered in 1999, astronomers told the Sunday Times of London (paywall). In 2135, Bennu will fly between the moon and Earth — a hair’s breadth in space terms, the Times reported. That’s so close that gravity from the Earth could effect Bennu’s orbit, “potentially putting it on course for the Earth later that century,” said Dante Lauretta, a professor of...

The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began its final approach toward the big near-Earth asteroid Bennu on Friday (Aug. 17), NASA officials said. The milestone also marks the official start of OSIRIS-REx's "asteroid operations" mission phase, they added. OSIRIS-REx is still about 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Bennu and won't arrive in orbit around the 1,650-foot-wide (500 meters) space rock until Dec. 3. The $800 million OSIRIS-REx mission — whose name is short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer — launched on Sept. 8, 2016, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. If all goes according to...

Boston - It was a normal Friday morning in the industrial city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. Adults were on their way to work, and children were in school. But that ordinary day was about to become extraordinary. Suddenly, a fireball shot across the clear morning sky leaving a thick trail of smoke, accompanied by the sound of a huge explosion. The shock wave knocked people over, shattered glass, and collapsed a factory roof. As many as 1,200 people were injured. A global network of infrasound sensors designed to pick up nuclear explosions calculated that the boom was 30 to 40 times...

For 10 days this month, OSIRIS-REx will investigate whether or not Trojan asteroids exist at certain points in Earth’s orbit called Lagrange points. Though Jupiter has Trojan asteroids, it’s unclear whether or not Earth’s Lagrange points host similar objects. After all, only one Earth Trojan has ever been found. “The Earth orbits around the Sun, and the Earth has a gravitational field and the Sun has a gravitational field,” explained Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS REx’s principal investigator. “Because of that property, there are certain points in space where those two fields balance each other out, called Lagrange points.” OSIRIS-REx will be...