The solar system formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Numerous fragments that bear witness to this early era orbit the sun as asteroids. Around three-quarters of these are carbon-rich C-type asteroids, such as 162173 Ryugu, which was the target of the Japanese Hayabusa2 mission in 2018 and 2019.
Asteroid 1998 OR2 is the biggest space rock expected to fly past Earth this year, and even amateurs can catch it in the sky.
MIT engineers devise a decision map to identify the best mission type to deflect an incoming asteroid.
A team of scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands developed a neural network — called “Hazardous Object Identifier” — that they claim predicts asteroid collisions with Earth.
Last night, ESA’s Planetary Defence team observed the rare moment in which an object escaped our planet’s gravity, in contrast to their normal objects of study—potentially hazardous rocks that could strike it.
The majority of stars in the universe will become luminous enough to blast surrounding asteroids into successively smaller fragments using their light alone, according to a University of Warwick astronomer
Scientists have discovered an asteroid with such a strange surface that they have named it the “golf ball”.
The smoldering crater left by the apocalyptic space rock became a nice home for blue-green algae within years of the impact.
The space rock probably reached its orbit after a series of close encounters with rocky planets
It was once thought that the gas giant Jupiter protected Earth from asteroids and other deadly space objects.
