Asteroid
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A history-making NASA spacecraft has just received a new lease on life. OSIRIS-REx, which is currently on its way back to Earth with rock samples from asteroid Bennu, will now have its mission extended to visit another asteroid, Apophis.
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With less than an hour's worth of data, NASA managed to predict that a 2-meter asteroid would impact in the Earth's atmosphere on March 11 at 5:23 pm EST, over the Norwegian Sea 470 km off the east coast of Greenland.
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We may not have long to react should we discover a deadly asteroid on a collision course. NASA is now investigating a proposal for a defense system that could break apart a hazardous space rock just days or even hours before a potential Earth strike.
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Astronomers had a tense January, as a newly discovered space rock became the riskiest asteroid in a decade – then hid behind the Moon for a week. Thankfully, further observations have found that it poses no risk to Earth when it swings by next year.
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Astronomers have discovered the first known quadruple asteroid system. A team from Thailand and France spotted a third moon orbiting the main-belt asteroid Elektra, moving the object into the record books.
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Although it should be extremely common in the universe, dark matter has proven tricky to detect. Now researchers have proposed an intriguing new method to spot it – looking for shock waves as dark matter “asteroids” collide with stars.
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NASA has monitored potentially hazardous asteroids for decades, but some factors couldn't be accounted for. The new Sentry-II system has now gone online, allowing astronomers to calculate the orbits and impact chances of asteroids far more precisely.
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Accounting for where all of the Earth's water came from is a longstanding puzzle, but an international team of scientists led by the University of Glasgow has proposed that the Sun may be a major source of our planet's H₂O.
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NASA has launched its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission to demonstrate a way to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids. The robotic probe lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket and is set to intercept its target in late September 2022.
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A curious space rock has just gotten curiouser. The asteroid Kamo`oalewa has an odd orbit that makes it almost a mini-moon of Earth – and now it may really earn that title, as new observations show that it could in fact be a fragment of the Moon.
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A first-of-a-kind NASA launch took place over the weekend, setting the agency's Lucy spacecraft on a pioneering path toward Jupiter to study an unprecedented number of asteroids as part of a single mission.
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About 66 million years ago, a gigantic object crashed into the Earth, triggering a mass extinction that took out the dinosaurs. Now, scientists say they’ve traced the culprit back to its point of origin, identifying it as a “dark primitive asteroid.”
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