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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Hubble Space Telescope captured this striking image of asteroid (6478) Gault, showing two narrow, comet-like tails of dusty debris. Each tail represents an episode in which the asteroid gently shed its material – key evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart.

Astronomers once thought asteroids were boring,

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Scientists have found an extraordinary snapshot of the fallout from the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Excavations in North Dakota reveal fossils of fish and trees that were
sprayed with rocky, glassy fragments that fell from the sky.

The deposits show evidence also of having been swamped with water –

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US detects huge meteor explosion

By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website,

A huge fireball
exploded in the Earth’s atmosphere in December, according to NASA.

The blast was the second largest of its kind in 30
years, and the biggest since the fireball over Chelyabinsk in Russia
six years ago.

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When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus
James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major
cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did
they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be.

“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought
when I started this work,”

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D

Dinosaurs were unaffected by long-term climate
changes and flourished before their sudden demise by asteroid strike.

Scientists largely agree that an asteroid impact,
possibly coupled with intense volcanic activity, wiped out the dinosaurs at the
end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago.

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