Asteroid

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”