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[T]he most important asteroid discoveries are now being made in twilight, when astronomers are able to look close to the horizon — and close to the sun — for little-known asteroids that orbit inside the orbits of Earth, Venus and even Mercury. That includes the first asteroid with an orbit interior to Venus and one with the shortest-known orbital period around the sun, both of which have been unearthed in the last two years. It also includes "city-killers," asteroids large enough that if they were to impact Earth, the damage would be severe. DECam and another telescope are making it...

An asteroid the size of a 50-story skyscraper will zoom past Earth Sunday (July 17), making its closest approach to our planet in nearly 100 years. The meaty space rock, dubbed 2022 KY4, will safely miss Earth by about 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers), or more than 16 times the average distance between Earth and the moon, according to NASA. This is considerably farther afield than the asteroid 2022 NF, which came within 56,000 miles (90,000 km) — or about 23% the average distance between Earth and the moon — on July 7. Asteroid 2022 KY4 is about 290...

Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments. The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks. The scientists released details of the discovery at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, US. They painted a picture of a calamitous event over North America that may have severely knocked back the populations of some...

On the morning of June 30, 1908, the sky exploded over a remote region of central Siberia. A fireball powerful as hundreds of Hiroshima atomic blasts scorched through the upper atmosphere "as if there was a second sun," according to one eyewitness. Scientists today think a small fragment of a comet or asteroid caused the "Tunguska event," so named for the Tunguska river nearby. No one knows for certain, however, because no fragment of the meteoroid has ever been found. The explosion was so vast—flattening and incinerating over an 800 square-mile swath of trees—that generations of amateur sleuths have put...

NASA has revealed that while collecting samples from the asteroid Bennu in October of 2020, the spacecraft's sampler arm sank over a foot in the loosely packed surface layer, as if there was no resistance. The spacecraft narrowly avoided being swallowed by firing up its thrusters and moving away from the surface. University of Arizona Regents Professor of Planetary Sciences, Dante Lauretta, revealed that the "particles making up Bennu's exterior are so loosely packed and lightly bound to each other that they act more like a fluid than a solid." Experts behind the mission likened the experience to jumping into...

OSIRIS REx Spacecraft Leaving Bennu Surface NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft leaving the surface of asteroid Bennu after collecting a sample. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab/SVS Scientists have learned something astonishing after analyzing data gathered when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft collected a sample from asteroid Bennu in October 2020. The spacecraft would have sunk into the asteroid had it not fired its thrusters to back away immediately after it grabbed its sample of dust and rock from Bennu’s surface. “Our expectations about the asteroid’s surface were completely wrong.” — Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx Unexpectedly, it turns out that the...

A small asteroid the size of a bus will make an extremely close approach to Earth on Thursday (July 7), passing within just 56,000 miles (90,000 kilometers)...And just a few days ago, no one knew it was coming The asteroid, named 2022 NF, is expected to pass safely by our planet, according to calculations by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Astronomers discovered the sneaky asteroid using data from the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) — a system of cameras and telescopes based in Hawaii with the primary goal of detecting near-Earth objects, or NEOs. On...

In a new study, researchers analyzed some of the tiny fragments of space rock that were left behind after the meteor exploded, known as meteorite dust. Normally, meteors produce a small amount of dust as they burn up, but the tiny grains are lost to scientists because they are either too small to find, scattered by the wind, fall into water or are contaminated by the environment. However, after the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded, a massive plume of dust hung in the atmosphere for more than four days before eventually raining down on Earth's surface, according to NASA. And luckily, layers...

An illustration of the Psyche asteroid. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU) If you wanted to do a forensic study of the Solar System, you might head for the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That's where you can find ancient rocks from the Solar System's early days. Out there in the cold vacuum of space, far from the Sun, asteroids are largely untouched by space weathering. Space scientists sometimes refer to asteroids – and their meteorite fragments that fall to Earth – as time capsules because of the evidence they hold. The asteroid Psyche is especially interesting, and NASA is sending a mission...

Over 100 participants from 18 countries – including NASA scientists and the agency’s NEOWISE mission – took part in the international exercise. Watching the skies for large asteroids that could pose a hazard to the Earth is a global endeavor. So, to test their operational readiness, the international planetary defense community will sometimes use a real asteroid’s close approach as a mock encounter with a “new” potentially hazardous asteroid. The lessons learned could limit, or even prevent, global devastation should the scenario play out for real in the future. To that end, more than 100 astronomers from around the world...

A Compilation of Chelyabinsk Meteor Footage from February 15, 2013February 14, 2015 | David Snodgress

You can tune in live Thursday and Friday (May 26 and 27) to watch an asteroid barrel past our planet at 10 times the distance of our moon. The space rock is known as asteroid 7335 (1989 JA) and is four times the size of the Empire State Building. While that's the largest asteroid flyby of 2022 yet, the rock will remain at a perfectly safe distance to our planet. The Virtual Telescope Project will run a webcast of the flyby beginning at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) on May 26 and again at 9 a.m. EDT (1300 GMT) on...

An international collaboration of astronomers has identified a curious occurrence of nine star-like objects that appeared and vanished in a small region within half an hour... Scientists from Sweden, Spain, the US, Ukraine, and India... investigated...photography that used glass plates to capture night sky images of April 12, 1950, exposed at the Palomar Observatory in California. They detected these transient stars, which were not to be found in photographs half an hour later and not traced since then. The astronomers have not found any explanation in well-established astrophysical phenomena like gravitational lensing, fast radio bursts or any variable star that...

Fear not: the asteroid, named 7335 (1989 JA), will soundly miss our planet by about 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers) — or nearly 10 times the average distance between Earth and the moon. Still, given the space rock's enormous size (1.1. miles, or 1.8 km, in diameter) and relatively close proximity to Earth, NASA has classified the asteroid as "potentially hazardous," meaning it could do enormous damage to our planet if its orbit ever changes and the rock impacts Earth. This asteroid is one of more than 29,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) that NASA tracks each year. NEOs refer to...

Researchers have found over 1,700 asteroid trails in archived Hubble data from the last 20 years. While many of the asteroids are previously known, more than 1,000 are not. What good are another 1,000 asteroids? Like all asteroids, they could hold valuable clues to the Solar System's history. As time passes and more and more telescopes perform more and more observations, their combined archival data keeps growing. Sometimes discoveries lurk in that data that await new analytical tools or renewed efforts from scientists before they're revealed. That's what happened in an effort called the Hubble Asteroid Hunter. In 2019 a...

There’s no need to panic though as Asteroid 388945 (2008 TZ3) should pass us from a distance of about 3.5 million miles away. That may sound pretty far away but in the grand scheme of space this isn’t a large distance at all. That’s why Nasa has still flagged it as a “close approach”. If an asteroid comes within 4.65 million miles and is over a certain size, it’s considered “potentially hazardous” by cautious space agencies. Sunday’s asteroid fits this description. It should shoot past from its safe distance at a speed of just over 18,000 miles per hour. Nasa...

Thankfully, it will still be well over 3.5 million miles away, so there’s nothing to panic about. Experts believe the asteroid is somewhere between 240 and 535 yards wide. At the maximum possible length, that would make it bigger than the Empire State Building, the Shard and the Eiffel Tower. It would dwarf the Statue of Liberty too. The space rock — officially known as 388945 (2008 TZ3) — is expected to make its closest approach on Sunday, May 15. Last time it paid a visit was in May 2020. Back then it came even closer, at 1.7 million miles...

This is an illustration of an asteroid. NASA/JPL-Caltech ===================================================================== I was cruising through the Google News science section this morning when a story popped out saying NASA has estimated a space rock the size of the Great Pyramid may hit our planet on May 6, and even that an impact is "likely." That's the kind of message that can get your adrenaline pumping. But don't fear. Asteroid 2009 JF1 won't be smacking into us. A quick peek around Twitter shows people expressing concern about the headlines, many of them asking the same question: Will it hit Earth? Fortunately, it will...

A small meteor that hit Earth in 2014 was from another star system, and may have left interstellar debris on the seafloor. An object from another star system crashed into Earth in 2014, the United States Space Command (USSC) confirmed in a newly-released memo. The meteor ignited in a fireball in the skies near Papua New Guinea, the memo states, and scientists believe it possibly sprinkled interstellar debris into the South Pacific Ocean. The confirmation backs up the breakthrough discovery of the first interstellar meteor—and, retroactively, the first known interstellar object of any kind to reach our solar system—which was...

A fireball that blazed through the skies over Papua New Guinea in 2014 was actually a fast-moving object from another star system, according to a recent memo(opens in new tab) released by the U.S. Space Command (USSC). The object, a small meteorite measuring just 1.5 feet (0.45 meter) across, slammed into Earth's atmosphere on Jan. 8, 2014, after traveling through space at more than 130,000 mph (210,000 km/h) — a speed that far exceeds the average velocity of meteors that orbit within the solar system, according to a 2019 study of the object published in the preprint database arXiv. 2019...