The asteroid Ryugu may look like a solid piece of rock, but it’s more accurate to liken it to an orbiting pile of rubble. Given the relative fragility of this collection of loosely bound boulders, researchers believe that Ryugu and similar asteroids probably don’t last very long due to disruptions and collisions from other asteroids.

…

Read more ›

In an interplanetary faux pas, it appears some pieces of asteroid Vesta ended up on asteroid Bennu, according to observations from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The new result sheds light on the intricate orbital dance of asteroids and on the violent origin of Bennu, which is a “rubble pile” asteroid that coalesced from the fragments of a massive collision.

…

Read more ›

Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized asteroids that orbit closer to the Sun than Venus does. The problem is, nobody’s been able to find one. Until now.

Astronomers working with the Zwicky Transient Facility say they’ve finally found one.

…

Read more ›

The University of Colorado Boulder and Lockheed Martin will soon lead a new space mission to capture the first-ever closeup look at a mysterious class of solar system objects: binary asteroids.

These bodies are pairs of asteroids that orbit around each other in space, much like the Earth and Moon.

…

Read more ›

In January 2019, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft was orbiting asteroid Bennu when the spacecraft’s cameras caught something unexpected: Thousands of tiny bits of material, some just the size of marbles, began to bounce off the surface of the asteroid – like a game of ping-pong in space. Since then, many such particle ejection events have been observed at Bennu’s surface.

…

Read more ›

NASA’s first mission to explore the Trojan asteroids is one step closer to launch. The Discovery Program’s Lucy mission passed a critical milestone and is officially authorized to transition to its next phase.

This major decision was made after a series of independent reviews of the status of the spacecraft,

…

Read more ›

In a year of devastating wildfires, destructive derechos, early and active hurricanes, widespread social unrest, contentious politics and more — all amid an unprecedented global pandemic — it might seem fitting that ‘asteroid impact’ would be added to the 2020 bingo card.

While weekend headlines buzzed over the prediction of an asteroid hitting Earth on November 2,

…

Read more ›

A new theory published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by scientists from Harvard University suggests that the Sun may once have had a binary companion of similar mass. If confirmed, the presence of an early stellar companion increases the likelihood that the Oort cloud was formed as observed and that Planet Nine was captured rather than formed within the solar system.

…

Read more ›

An SUV-size space rock flew past our planet over the weekend and was detected by a NASA-funded asteroid survey as it departed. Near Earth Asteroids, or NEAs, pass by our home planet all the time. But an SUV-size asteroid set the record this past weekend for coming closer to Earth than any other known NEA: It passed 1,830 miles (2,950 kilometers) above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday,

…

Read more ›

On August 10, 2020, JAXA was informed that the Authorisation of Return of Overseas-Launched Space Object (AROLSO) for the re-entry capsule from Hayabusa2 was issued by the Australian Government. The date of the issuance is August 6, 2020.

The Hayabusa2 re-entry capsule will return to Earth in South Australia on December 6,

…

Read more ›