Twenty-five years ago, humanity first witnessed a
collision between a comet and a planet. From July 16 to 22, 1994, enormous
pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9), discovered just a year prior,
crashed into Jupiter over several days, creating huge, dark scars in the
planet’s atmosphere and lofting superheated plumes into its stratosphere.

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For the first time, astronomers at the University
of Hawaii have demonstrated that their ATLAS and Pan-STARRS survey telescopes
can provide sufficient warning to move people away from the impact site of an
incoming asteroid. They detected a small asteroid prior to its entering the
Earth’s atmosphere near Puerto Rico on the morning of June 22,

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Every single day, many tons of tiny rocks – smaller
than pebbles – hit Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrate. Between frequent
shooting stars we wish on in the night sky and the massive extinction-level
asteroids that we hope we never see, there is a middle ground of rocks sized to
make it through the atmosphere and do serious damage to a limited area.

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Designed to explore a metal asteroid that could be
the heart of a planet, the Psyche mission is readying for a 2022 launch. After
extensive review, NASA Headquarters in Washington has approved the mission to
begin the final design and fabrication phase, otherwise known as Phase C. This
is when the Psyche team finalizes the system design,

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Whenever scientists announce an upcoming close encounter with an
asteroid, certain corners of the internet light up like the synaptic rush that
accompanies a meth binge, with panicky headlines shouted straight from the
brain stem. But never mind that. We’re not that corner of the internet. We’re
sober, yo!

The fact
of the matter is,

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By Jonathan AmosBBC Science Correspondent

Scientists think
the time has come for a full geophysical survey of The Minch, to see if the
Scottish strait is hiding an ancient meteorite crater.

The idea that such
a structure lies between the Western Isles and mainland Scotland was first
raised back in 2008.

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The unique capabilities of the SPHERE instrument on
ESO’s Very Large Telescope have enabled it to obtain the sharpest images of a
double asteroid as it flew by Earth on 25 May. While this double asteroid was
not itself a threatening object, scientists used the opportunity to rehearse
the response to a hazardous Near-Earth Object (NEO),

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It looked like a scene from a sci-fi blockbuster: an astronomer in the Netherlands captured footage of a train of brightly-lit SpaceX satellites ascending through the night sky this weekend, stunning space enthusiasts across the globe.

But the sight has also provoked an outcry among astronomers who say the constellation,

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GomSpace’s subsidiary in Luxembourg and the
European Space Agency (ESA) have signed a contract of EUR 400.000 for the Phase
A design of the Miniaturised Asteroid Remote Geophysical Observer (M-ARGO)
mission.

Under the contract GomSpace will be in charge of
preliminary design of the mission, spacecraft and implementation planning.

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You’ve never seen a night sky
sight quite like this. 

It’s been one day since SpaceX launched its first 60 Starlink internet satellites into
orbit, and skywatchers around the World have already spotted them soaring
across the night sky.

SpaceX launched the satellites
into an initial orbit 273 miles (440 kilometers) above Earth.

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