Space mining of water and precious metals has the potential to become a trillion-dollar industry in the coming years, experts say
Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought.
Extremely strong vibration during large impacts, landslides and earthquakes allow rock to flow
New research suggests the “rock comet” is weirder than previously thought.
The first study of its environmental impact suggests that extracting resources such as platinum from asteroids might be cleaner than doing so on Earth.
They both orbit the sun, but they’re very different.
A German-French probe called MASCOT was sent to the surface of Ryugu, an asteroid located 190 million miles from Earth, to collect valuable data. But it needed to work fast—the shoebox-sized probe had only 16 hours to live.
A Japanese mission has captured mesmerizing views of a distant space rock.
The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu — and they’ve even sent back some wild postcards from their new home.
After an almost two-year journey through space, NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) caught its first glimpse of Bennu, a carbonaceous asteroid whose makeup may record the earliest history of our Solar System, last week and began the final approach toward the asteroid. Using its multipurpose PolyCam camera, the spacecraft obtained the image of Bennu from a distance of 1.4 million miles (2.2 million km), or almost six times the distance between the Earth and Moon.
