Asteroid

Space exploration in 2021 will see some major milestones to look forward to. From maiden flights to fiery endings, long-awaited launches to history-making first steps, here are some of the biggest upcoming events in space exploration this year.

It's rare that gravel gets scientists so excited, but these are no ordinary rocks. This is the first glimpse of the samples returned to Earth by Hayabusa2 after its 5.24-billion-km round trip to asteroid Ryugu.

The re-entry capsule carrying samples of the asteroid Ryugu collected by Japan's Hayabusa2 deep-space probe has returned to Earth and been recovered after blazing a fiery path in the night sky over Australia.

Last week, the Earth had its closest shave with an asteroid ever recorded, when a small space rock skimmed just 370 km (230 miles) above the surface. For comparison, that’s closer than the orbit of the International Space Station.

Asteroid Apophis has attracted its share of attention, with several projected close shaves with Earth in the coming decades. While most have been ruled out, a previously-overlooked factor has opened a small window for a possible collision in 2068.

NASA has successfully stowed the leaking sampler head containing material from the asteroid Bennu inside the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft's Sample Return Capsule after its collection attempt proved a little too successful.

Images returned by NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid explorer have confirmed that the spacecraft's sample collector head is slowly leaking some of the material it gathered from the surface of the asteroid Bennu, but it's not all bad news.

On Tuesday this week, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft briefly touched down on the surface of asteroid Bennu to snatch a sample of the ancient pristine rock, and took off again. And now NASA has released images and video from the robot’s perspective.

In a truly remarkable feat of engineering, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has scooped a sample of soil from the surface of asteroid Bennu, as it hurtles through space some 205 million miles from Earth.

New findings from NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe of asteroid Bennu's gravity field suggest that the core is less dense than the outside shell, and possibly contains a large void – which could spell its doom in the not-too-distant future.

ESA has awarded €129.4 million of funding to the planetary defense mission Hera, which, slated for launch in 2024, will observe the results of humanity’s first attempt to intentionally alter the orbit of a solar system asteroid.

NASA has given the University of Colorado Boulder and Lockheed Martin the green light for the Janus mission, which tasks a pair of small satellites with returning the first high-resolution images of binary asteroids.