Comets

ESA has given the green light to launch a mission designed to make the first flyby of a comet visiting the inner solar system for the first time. The "Comet Interceptor" mission will be set in a standby orbit, where it will wait for the discovery of an incoming comet to intercept.

Earth is a famously wet planet, but where all that water came from in the first place remains a mystery. New observations of a comet that whizzed by Earth a few months ago show that it contains “ocean-like” water – and this may apply to other previously-dismissed comets too.

Scientists have discovered a tiny fragment of a comet in a meteorite. The bulk of the rock itself was once an asteroid, but when the team cracked it open and analyzed the inside, they found that the growing asteroid must have swept up the seed of a comet billions of years ago.

The comet 46P/Wirtanen is set to make a close approach to Earth this weekend, and may even be bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. At its closest, 46P will pass a mere 7.2 million miles (11.7 million km) from our planet, making it the 10th closest comet encounter in the modern era.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) did a bit of limbering up before commencing its science operations on July 25, 2018. The unmanned space telescope demonstrated what it could do by snapping a series of images capturing the motion of a comet over the course of 17 hours.​​

‘Oumuamua is the first interstellar visitor ever detected passing through our Solar System, and while it was originally classed as an asteroid after its discovery, astronomers have now updated the label. ‘Oumuamua, it turns out, is a comet after all, but it’s unlike any other known comet.

Evidence is mounting that the building blocks of life were assembled in space and then delivered to Earth after new experiments managed to produce a key amino acid under simulated space conditions. This means we humans, and all other life on the planet, might have actually been aliens all along.​

​​NASA has released a video showing the locations and motions of 29,375 asteroids and comets discovered by the agency’s Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) since the start of its mission in December 2013.

About 70,000 years ago, an interstellar interloper brushed past less than a light-year from us. A new study has found that the effects of this close encounter are still felt today, as the orbits of hundreds of comets and asteroids still bear the star’s gravitational influence.

In 1996, scientists discovered the strangest stone ever found. Nicknamed the Hypatia stone, it was later found to be extraterrestrial, but unlike any known kind of meteorite. A new study has deepened the mystery even further, finding that Hypatia could be interstellar or predate the Solar System.

NASA has ramped up its next phase of space exploration by green lighting further development of two unmanned mission concepts scheduled to launch sometime in the mid-2020s.

NASA has released a gallery of images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, showcasing celestial objects contained in the Messier catalog. The collection was compiled by renowned French astronomer Charles Messier to help colleagues differentiate wandering comets from other objects, like nebulae.