Jay TateESA’s planet-defending Hera mission
will set a new record in space. The asteroid investigator will not only be the
first spacecraft to explore a binary asteroid system – the Didymos pair – but
the smaller of these two worldlets, comparable in size to Egypt’s Great Pyramid
of Giza, will become the smallest asteroid ever visited.
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Jay TateBy looking at
the Moon, the most complete and accessible chronicle of the asteroid collisions
that carved our young solar system, a group of scientists is challenging our
understanding of a part of Earth’s history.
The number of
asteroid impacts to the Moon and Earth increased by two to three times starting
around 290 million years ago,
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Jay TateThe celestial
body known as AG3 was first mapped in December. Scientists then prepared to
keep track of it, as it was projected to pass in the Earth’s vicinity two weeks
into the new year.
A huge asteroid
tracked by radars only a month ago passed just a short distance away from our
planet in the early hours of Monday,
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Jay TateAustralians find extremely rare mineral in
meteorite impact crater
A group of scientists has discovered one of the rarest
minerals on Earth buried deep within what may be the largest-known meteorite
impact crater in Australia.
The ultra-rare mineral known as reidite was found by
Curtin University researchers in the long buried Woodleigh Crater near Shark
Bay,
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Jay TateOn Dec. 3, after traveling billions of kilometers from
Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached its target, Bennu, and kicked off a
nearly two-year, up-close investigation of the asteroid. It will inspect nearly
every square inch of this ancient clump of rubble left over from the formation
of our solar system.
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Jay TateSkywatchers will get a special treat next week as the year’s brightest comet flies across the night sky.
Though the comet has the rather uninspiring name of “46P/Wirtanen,” it will be among the 10 closest comet approaches to Earth since 1950 and the 20th-closest approach of a comet dating as far back as the ninth century,
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Jay TateNASA’s first-ever mission designed to visit an asteroid and return a sample of its dust back to Earth arrived Monday at its destination, Bennu, two years after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The $800 million unmanned mission, known as OSIRIS-REx, made a rendez-vous with the asteroid at around 12:10 pm (1710 GMT),
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Jay TateThe American space agency’s Osiris-Rex probe has drawn up alongside the Asteroid Bennu after a two-year, two-billion-km journey from Earth.
The mission will spend 2.5 years at the 500m-wide rock, mapping its surface and studying its composition.
In mid-2020, scientists will direct Osiris-Rex to drop down to the object and grab at least 60g of regolith,
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Jay Tate29 November 2018
Today the NEO community mourns the loss of Italian mathematician and astronomer Andrea Milani, a leading figure in Europe’s space science community.
Andrea, a professor of mathematics at Pisa University who passed away unexpectedly yesterday, devised the original Don Quijote asteroid deflection demonstration concept: to shift the orbital trajectory of an asteroid through the impact of one spacecraft,
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Jay TateOn October 19th, 2017, the first interstellar object – named 1I/2017 U1 (aka. ‘Oumuamua) – to be observed in our Solar System was detected. In the months that followed, multiple follow-up observations were conducted to gather more data on its composition, shape, and possible origins. Rather than dispel the mystery surrounding the true nature of ‘Oumuamua – is a comet or an asteroid?
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