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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...

However, there is no need to panic; astronomers say the massive space rock will miss us by around 4.6 million miles (7.4 million kilometers). The asteroid, known as 2007 FF1, is between 360 feet and 656 feet (110 and 260 meters) in diameter, according to SpaceReference.com, a database that compiles information from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the International Astronomical Union. The rock 2007 FF1 is known as an Apollo-class asteroid, of which there are around 15,000, meaning that its orbit around the sun (which takes 684 days) crosses with Earth's orbit. The asteroid is classified as potentially...

A fireball over San Francisco Bay Area on 17 Oct 2012. (NASA/Robert P. Moreno Jr) On 11 March 2022, at around 9:20 pm UTC, a small asteroid entered Earth's atmosphere. This is not unusual. Space rocks enter Earth's atmosphere all the time. What makes this asteroid so amazing is that an astronomer spotted it before it made its rendezvous with atmospheric entry. It's named 2022 EB5, and it's only the fifth asteroid we've ever managed to spot prior to impact. The object, thought to measure around two meters across (6.5 ft), was spotted by astronomer Krisztián Sárneczky of Konkoly Observatory's...

Getting to bottom of crater mystery 06/22/2003By ALEXANDRA WITZE / The Dallas Morning News ODESSA – It took two hours for Vance Holliday to travel back thousands of years. For a time machine, he drilled into the dirt of the meteor crater just west of Odessa. The deeper he went, the closer Dr. Holliday got to his goal – discovering the crater's age. When the Odessa meteorite hit, some tens of thousands of years ago, it would have been a fearsome sight. An iron rock nearly 50 feet across fell screaming from the sky, hitting with energy roughly equivalent to...

60m-year-old meteor crater mapped in North Sea Scientists have mapped a small but well-preserved crater in the North Sea formed by a meteorite they believe smacked into Earth 60 to 65 million years ago. The impact crater measures about six miles wide and sits beneath 120 feet of seawater and more than 900 feet of sediment. Researchers believe the so-called Silverpit crater was formed after the catastrophic impact near Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula that scientists suspect contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. "We know so little about how impact structures are created when meteorites and comets hit," said University of...

In late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered. Astronomers have been left to guess whether the object was an asteroid or a comet, and figuring out what it was would allow better modeling of potential future calamities. Italian researchers now think they've found a smoking gun: The 164-foot-deep Lake Cheko, located just 5 miles northwest of the epicenter of destruction. "When we looked at...

The Yilan crater. (NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin/Landsat data/USGS) A crescent-shaped crater in Northeast China holds the record as the largest impact crater on Earth that formed in the last 100,000 years. Prior to 2020, the only other impact crater ever discovered in China was found in Xiuyan county of the coastal province of Liaoning, according to a statement from the NASA Earth Observatory. Then, in July 2021, scientists confirmed that a geological structure in the Lesser Xing'an mountain range had formed as a result of a space rock striking Earth. The team published a description of the newfound impact crater...

We’ve long known a disaster took place about 66 million years ago, where in a geological instant, 75% of the plants and animals on Earth were wiped out, including all the land-roaming dinosaurs. But here’s a new detail about that event: Even though we can’t pinpoint exactly what year this disaster took place, we now know it happened during the springtime. Most scientists agree the disaster was an asteroid impact, where an asteroid at least 10 kilometers wide struck the Chicxulub region in the present-day Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The impact released 2 million times more energy than the most...

Elektra and its three moons. (ESO/Berdeu et al., Yang et al.) ====================================================================================== An asteroid discovered in the 19th century has just been identified as the most crowded we've ever found. It's called 130 Elektra, or just Elektra for short, and astronomers have just discovered that it has not one, nor two, but three smaller satellite companions, or moons. That not only makes it the most numerous asteroid system known to date, but demonstrates how we might find other faint, hard-to-see asteroid moons in the future. "Elektra is the first quadruple system ever detected," wrote a team of astronomers led by...

On Tuesday, February 22, Asteroid (455176) 1999 VF22 will fly past Earth at around 2:54 am EST. This object is classified as "potentially hazardous" as it gets near our planet and is fairly large, but next week's flyby is perfectly safe. The space rock won’t get closer than 5,366,000 kilometers (3,334,000 miles) – that’s almost 14 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. NASA’s Small-Body Database gives an absolute magnitude for the object of 20.7, but without an albedo – the fraction of reflected light by the surface – it is very difficult to estimate its true size....

Elektra was first discovered in 1873, orbiting in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Oblong-shaped and 160 miles across on its longest side, it is a relatively large asteroid and completes an orbit of the sun every five years. In 2003, the first moon was discovered orbiting Elektra, and in 2014 a second. The discoveries were interesting, but not unusual — more than 150 asteroids are known to have one or two moons, in the same way planets can have moons that are gravitationally bound to them. “Multiple moons can be found around large asteroids,” said Bin Yang, an...

Earth has officially been joined in its orbit around the Sun by a new trojan asteroid. Named 2020 XL5, this chunk of rock is only the second object of its type ever to have been conclusively identified. Its discovery suggests that perhaps Earth trojans may be more common than we knew, and offers new insights into these mysterious rocks. Like the first trojan, astronomers predict that 2020 XL5 will hang around for at least 4,000 years before zipping off to parts elsewhere. "The discovery of a second Earth trojan asteroid may enhance our knowledge of the dynamics of this elusive...

Taking aim at a distant asteroid, SpaceX fired a small NASA probe into space early Wednesday, setting up a head-on 15,000 mph impact next September to test the feasibility of nudging a threatening body off course long before it could crash into Earth. The $330 million Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, the first test flight in a NASA planetary defense initiative, "will be historic," said Tom Statler, mission program scientist at NASA Headquarters. "For the first time, humanity will change the motion of a natural celestial body in space." Perched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the DART mission...

The asteroid, known as 7482 (1994 PC1), is set to fly by the planet at 1:51 p.m. PT, traveling at a speed of about 43,754 mph, according to NASA. “Near-Earth #asteroid 1994 PC1 (~1 km wide) is very well known and has been studied for decades by our #PlanetaryDefense experts,” With a diameter of approximately 3,451 feet, the asteroid is more than twice the size of the Empire State Building. And while there’s no threat that the asteroid will hit our planet, NASA still considers it a “potentially hazardous object” due to a combination of size and distance from Earth....

The asteroid's orbit gets quite close to our moon's. (NASA/JPL) ************************************************************************** In a slow-moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from Earth. This is about five times the distance from Earth to the Moon, and just a shade over the distance to the anti-sunward Earth-Sun Lagrange 2 point, soon to be the home of the James Webb Space Telescope. Fortunately, both Earth and said...