Small enough to be an aircraft carry-on, the
Juventas spacecraft nevertheless has big mission goals. Once in orbit around
its target body, Juventas will unfurl an antenna larger than itself, to perform
the very first subsurface radar survey of an asteroid.

ESA’s proposed Hera mission for planetary defence
will explore the twin Didymos asteroids,

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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has called for
more global participation in efforts to deflect asteroids that could collide
with Earth.

Bridenstine spoke to the 2019 Planetary Defense
Conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday morning in an event that was streamed
live online. The conference was organized by the International Association for
the Advancement of Space Safety.

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Here’s a hypothetical: a telescope detects an
asteroid between 100 and 300 meters in diameter racing through our solar system
at 14 kilometers per second, 57 million kilometers from Earth.

Astronomers estimate a one percent risk the space
rock will collide with our planet on April 27, 2027.

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e

The Hayabusa-2 spacecraft has sent back images of the crater made when it detonated an explosive charge on the asteroid it is investigating.

On 5 April, the Japanese probe released a 14kg device packed with
plastic explosive on to the asteroid Ryugu.

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NASA’s
Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission
released its fifth year of survey data on April 11, 2019. The five years of
NEOWISE data have significantly advanced scientists’ knowledge of asteroids and
comets in the solar system, as well as the stars and galaxies beyond.

“NEOWISE
recently surpassed 95 billion recorded measurements of asteroids,

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1. Why Asteroids Impact Earth

Why do asteroids and meteoroids collide with Earth?
These objects orbit the Sun just like the planets, as they have been doing for
billions of years, but small effects such as gravitational nudges from the
planets can jostle the orbits, making them gradually shift over million-year
timescales or abruptly reposition if there is a close planetary encounter.

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A small asteroid has been caught in the process of
spinning so fast it’s throwing off material, according to new data from NASA’s
Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories. Images from Hubble show two
narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris streaming from the asteroid (6478)
Gault. Each tail represents an episode in which the asteroid gently shed its
material –

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Metallic asteroids are thought to have started out
as blobs of molten iron floating in space. As if that’s not strange enough,
scientists now think that as the metal cooled and solidified, volcanoes spewing
liquid iron could have erupted through a solid iron crust onto the surface of
the asteroid.

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Making a dent: Japan probe prepares to blast asteroid

A Japanese probe began descending towards an asteroid on Thursday on a mission to blast a crater into its surface and collect material that could shed light on the solar system’s evolution.

The mission will be the latest in a series of explorations carried out by the Japanese space agency’s Hayabusa2 probe and could reveal more about the origin of life on Earth.

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Scientists to Conduct
Largest-Ever Hubble Survey of the Kuiper Belt

NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
recently awarded Southwest Research Institute the largest Hubble Space
Telescope (HST) solar system program ever, with 206 of Hubble’s orbits around
the Earth allocated to the project. The Solar System Origins Legacy Survey
(SSOLS) will focus on Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs),

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