Tag Archives: asteroid

The latest mission out of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) will examine not one, but two space bodies. After Tianwen-2 launches Wednesday afternoon, it will rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid, then send samples to Earth before setting out to meet with a distant comet.If all goes according to plan, …

It’s only a matter of time before a large asteroid hits Earth—it’s happened before, and it will happen again. The more we know about asteroids, the more likely it is that humanity could do something about it, though. The European Space Agency (ESA) has just kicked off a new project …

NASA’s InSight lander may have ended its run on Mars, but the data it collected is still reverberating around the scientific community, not unlike the seismic waves it tracked within the red planet. After initially chalking a marsquake up to an asteroid impact, researchers now report that this massive quake …

NASA has announced preliminary results from the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which successfully smashed into the asteroid Dimorphos several weeks ago. Now, the mission is successful in more ways than one — NASA would have been happy with altering the space rock’s orbit by a few seconds, but …

Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop …

Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop …

Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop …

About 66 million years ago (the end of the Cretaceous period), a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that led …

An international team of scientists has studied both the water and organic contents from a dust particle recovered from the surface of the near-Earth S-type asteroid 25143 Itokawa by JAXA’s Hayabusa mission, which was the first mission that brought pristine asteroidal materials to Earth. The S-type asteroid Itokawa. Image credit: …

The parent body of the Almahata Sitta meteorites — space rocks that rained down on the Nubian Desert in Sudan in 2008 — is a 640 to 1,800 km-wide water-rich asteroid that is as yet unknown, according to new research. Hamilton et al. studied the composition of Almahata Sitta 202 …