Asteroid

When NASA's Psyche probe launches in October on its mission to a metal asteroid as much as 309 million miles (497 million km) from Earth, it will be carrying a new laser communications system that promises to revolutionize deep space missions.

After focussing on an asteroid that was struck in 2022 by a half-tonne NASA robotic probe traveling over seven times faster than a bullet, the Hubble Space Telescope has detected a swarm of 37 boulders that were dislodged by the impact.

Researchers just can’t seem to keep their hands off the peanut-shaped asteroid Itokawa, and with good reason. Having already revealed some curious mineral quirks, it's now surprised scientists with its salt crystals, hinting at a water-bearing past.

NASA has given the okay to its long-delayed US$985 million Psyche deep-space mission to explore a metal-rich asteroid, also called Psyche, that may be worth as much as $10 quadrillion, or 90 times the world's entire $110-trillion economy.

When ESA's Juventas CubeSat lands on Dimorphos to assess the aftermath of last year's spectacular collisions with NASA's DART spacecraft, its GRASS instrument will directly measure the asteroid's gravitational pull, which is a millionth that of the Earth.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected water vapor on an object in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system where it wasn’t known to survive. The new observations also reveal something unexpectedly missing.

This space oddity has long puzzled scientists for its peculiar non-asteroid-like behaviors. Researchers have now uncovered another curious characteristic of 3200 Phaethon, this time with its dazzling tail, rewriting 14 years of science knowledge.

Samples taken from the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu continue to provide scientists with important insights. The discovery of the nucleobase uracil, a part of RNA, in the samples, hints at the potential beginnings of life on our planet.

In September, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid to test a potential planetary defense technique. To mark the publication of four scientific papers, NASA has released a video of the impact captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Astronomers are tracking nearby asteroids, but there’s one glaring blindspot in the sky – the Sun. Thankfully, ESA plans to plug the gap soon with NEOMIR, a mission that will give us advance warning of any Earth-bound rocks from that direction.

Radio waves from Alaska have been transmitted to an asteroid passing just two lunar distances away from the Earth. The information gathered could arm scientists with information that may be critical in defending the planet from a collision some day.

The collision between NASA’s DART spacecraft and the asteroid Dimorphos was always going to be a spectacle. By analyzing data from telescopes and tiny satellites nearby, scientists are now piecing together some fascinating details around the event.