As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

asteroid

New York Destroyed Again (In a Simulation)

by
New York - Deposit Photos

New York City, home to 8.6 million people and one hot duck, has perished in an apocalyptic meteor strike … in a simulation. Over the past week, some 200 space experts from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and other organizations have been melding their minds in order to face the crisis of a hypothetical asteroid barreling through space toward North America. The gathering, called the International Academy of Astronautics Planetary Defense Conference, convenes every year with the not-so-simple task of figuring out how to save Earth from a head-on asteroid impact — sort of like war games, but on … Read more

NASA Probe Captures Amazing Images of Asteroid

by
Bennu

You’ve never seen an asteroid like this before. This technicolor marvel is a compilation of more than 11 million measurements of an asteroid called Bennu, all gathered by a NASA probe called OSIRIS-REx. That spacecraft arrived in December and since then has been conducting a carefully planned survey of the space rock. The 3-dimensional view is based on data gathered in February and shows the surface height of Bennu, with a nearly 200-foot (60-meter) difference in height between the lowland dark blue areas and the red peaks. Now, the spacecraft has just entered a phase called the Detailed Survey: Equatorial … Read more

SPACE: Japan Copper Bombs an Asteroid

by

A Japanese spacecraft deployed a heavy, explosive-packed copper plate toward the asteroid Ryugu in an attempt to create an artificial crater last night (April 4), but it’s still unclear how the dramatic operation went. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft, which has been studying the 3,000-foot-wide (900 meters) Ryugu up close since last June, released a 4.4-lb. (2 kilograms) hunk of copper late last night, along with a camera known as DCAM3 to record this “Small Carry-on Impactor” (SCI) operation. “The spacecraft state is normal and it was confirmed that the evacuation operation, the separation of the SCI and DCAM3 went as planned. The … Read more

SPACE: Ultima Thule is a Frankenstein Beast

by
Ultima Thule

Less than three months after the New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a distant, cold space rock, scientists are beginning to piece together the story of how that object, nicknamed Ultima Thule, came to be. In a series of scientific presentations held March 18 at the 50th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, mission scientists shared new data about the space rock’s topography and composition, which is helping them to refine scenarios about how the object formed. “Every single observation that we planned worked as planned,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission and a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research … Read more

SPACE: It Might Be Harder Than We Think to “Armageddon” an Asteroid

by

When a science fiction plot portrays Earth in peril from a potentially devastating asteroid impact, a collection of heroes usually swoops in to save the day by detonating the enormous space rock into fragments. But in reality, exploding a city-size asteroid may require more power than once thought, according to a new study. Scientists had previously used computer models to estimate the impact needed to successfully shatter a big asteroid. However, a new model by another team of researchers recently came to a different conclusion by adding a variable that an older model omitted: how quickly cracks would spread through … Read more

NASA Probe Makes Tantalizing Find – Live Science

by
Asteroid Bennu

It looks like NASA chose the right space rock for its asteroid-sampling mission. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx probe, which just arrived at Bennu last week, has already found hydrated minerals on the 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) near-Earth asteroid, mission team members announced yesterday (Dec. 10). The discovery suggests that liquid water was once plentiful in the interior of Bennu’s parent body, which scientists think was a roughly 62-mile-wide (100 kilometers) rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. (Bennu is likely a pile of rubble that coalesced after a massive impact shattered that larger object hundreds of millions of years … Read more

SPACE: Check Out This Bizarre, Blue Space Rock

by
3200 Phaethon

A bizarre, blue asteroid that acts like a comet and appears to be responsible for the annual Geminid meteor showermade a close flyby of Earth last year, giving astronomers an opportunity to study the object in unprecedented detail. They found that the asteroid is even weirder than they had imagined. Asteroid 3200 Phaethon is a special space rock with a rare blue color and an extremely eccentric orbit that has the object pass superclose to the sun and then out past the orbit of Mars. One orbit takes about 1.4 Earth years. This kind of orbit is more typical for … Read more

SPACE: The Hopping Landers of Ryugu

by
Hoppy Laner - Ryugu - Live Science

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. The tiny rovers are part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 asteroid sample-return mission. Engineers with the agency deployed the robots early Friday (Sept. 21), but JAXA waited until today (Sept. 22) to confirm the operation was successful and both rovers made the landing safely. The rovers are part of the MINERVA-II1 program, and are designed to hop along the asteroid’s surface, taking photographs and gathering data. In fact, one … Read more

SCIENCE: Scientists Blast a Fake Asteroid Into A Fake Earth (And It’s Really Cool)

by
asteroid cannon

Scientists at Brown University wanted to find out. So, they did what any one of us would do and built an indoor asteroid cannon — with a lot of help from NASA. The resulting study, published April 25 in the journal Science Advances, may sound ridiculous (or ridiculously awesome), but it aims to answer some of the most persistent questions in the science of planet formation. How did initially bone-dry planets get their water in the earliest days of the solar system? Why were traces of water discovered in the mantle of Earth’s parched moon or near the massive Tycho … Read more

SPACE: Spacecraft Could Nuke Dangerous Asteroid to Defend Earth

by
Asteroid - pixabay

The next time a hazardous asteroid lines Earth up in its crosshairs, we may be ready for the threat. Scientists and engineers with the U.S. government have drawn up plans for a spacecraft that could knock big, incoming space rocks off course via blunt-force impact or blow them to bits with a nuclear warhead, BuzzFeed News reported. The researchers announced the concept vehicle, known as the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER), in a study in the February issue of the journal Acta Astronautica. And the team will discuss HAMMER at an asteroid-research conference in May, according to … Read more