Nearly four years after NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft collected a sample from an asteroid, scientists are finally revealing the intriguing composition of the space rock. Among them, the near-Earth asteroid, known as Bennu, contains a surprising reservoir of a mineral called magnesium phosphate. These bright-white particles sprinkled in a sea of Bennu’s dark rocks is a … Read more
Scientists have discovered that the target asteroid of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) may have been reshaped by the impact. A new investigation into the collision’s aftermath revealed that the asteroid, which is the smaller component of a binary asteroid system, exhibits a loose “rubble-pile” composition. DART slammed into the moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits … Read more
Scientists are now inspecting snagged, bagged and tagged bits and pieces from asteroid Bennu, the cosmic mother lode delivered by NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security — Regolith Explorer mission. Known in acronymic astro-speak as OSIRIS-REx, that seven-year-long voyage brought home the goods via a sample return canister that came to full stop … Read more
Tasked with finding clues about origins of life on Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft scooped up pieces of a rugged, rubble-pile asteroid named Bennu in late 2020 and delivered them to Earth about two months ago. On Monday (Dec. 11), scientists got their first detailed description of some of that extraterrestrial collection. “We definitely have hydrated, … Read more
Scientists recently discovered an asteroid that tags along with Earth during its yearly journey around the sun. Dubbed 2023 FW13, the space rock is considered a “quasi-moon” or “quasi-satellite,” meaning it orbits the sun in a similar time frame as Earth does, but is only slightly influenced by our planet’s gravitational pull. It is estimated … Read more
On June 30, 1908, an asteroid flattened an estimated 80 million trees in Siberia over 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers). Dubbed the Tunguska event, it is considered the biggest asteroid impact in recorded history. Yet no one has ever found the asteroid fragments or an impact site. The asteroid lit up the skies in … Read more
Rest easy: Earth probably won’t be creamed by a killer asteroid in the next 1,000 years. New research accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal and available on the preprint server arXiv.org finds that none of the kilometer-wide (0.6 mile) asteroids that travel near Earth are likely to hit the planet in the next millennium. … Read more
Neptune is famously a vivid blue, but the asteroids orbiting near it are decidedly not. An international team of astronomers recently took a peek at Neptune’s Trojan asteroids and found that they all seem to be some shade of red — far redder than most asteroids in the solar system. They published their results Feb. … Read more
The asteroid Ryugu, which orbits the sun between Earth and Mars, contains many of the building blocks for life, a new analysis finds. The study, published Feb. 23 in the journal Science, is one of the first peeks at the samples from Ryugu brought back by Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft in 2020. The mission is only … Read more
Dust collected from the surface of an ancient, peanut-shaped and “potentially-hazardous” asteroid has revealed that some space rocks are much bouncier and harder to destroy than first thought — posing concerns about Earth’s long-term safety. The analysis of three tiny dust particles — gathered from the surface of the 1640-foot-long (500 meters) rubble pile asteroid … Read more
