Jay TateAfter traveling for two years and billions of kilometers from Earth, the OSIRIS-REx probe is only a few months away from its destination: the intriguing asteroid Bennu. When it arrives in December, OSIRIS-REx will embark on a nearly two-year investigation of this clump of rock, mapping its terrain and finding a safe and fruitful site from which to collect a sample.
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Jay TateNASA’s efforts to better understand asteroid impacts has found unexpected support from a new satellite sensor designed to detect lightning. New research published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science finds that the new Geostationary Lightning Mapper, or GLM, on two weather satellites is able to pick up signals of meteors in Earth’s atmosphere.
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Jay TateNext time when your kids ask you to bring them a star from the sky, you don’t have to shrug and walk away. Tell them to wait, instead.
A group of Chinese scientists are mulling a bold idea to capture a small near-Earth asteroid, which might be a potential threat,
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Jay TateNASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Enters Third Decade. On March 11, 1998, asteroid astronomers around the world received an ominous message: new observational data on the recently discovered asteroid 1997 XF11 suggested there was a chance that the half-mile-wide (nearly one kilometer) object could hit Earth in 2028.
The message came from the Minor Planet Center,
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Jay TateSurprise — it’s twins!
That’s the realization that struck astronomers in June after they set out to study a near-Earth asteroid called 2017 YE5, which NASA today (July 12) announced is actually two asteroids, a pair of objects orbiting each other.
The bouncing-baby asteroids were revealed by three radar telescopes,
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Jay TateBy Eric Mack
The bus-sized pieces of space debris whipped by us at relatively close range over the weekend.
They almost snuck by undetected, but two small asteroids were discovered over the weekend just hours after they whizzed past us about 72,000 miles away — about one-third the distance to the moon.
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Jay TateA meteorite was found in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) that is a fragment of asteroid 2018 LA. This small asteroid was discovered in space by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey on June 2, 2018, eight hours before hitting Earth. The asteroid burst through the upper atmosphere and resulted in a meteor fireball.
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Jay TateBased on a new study of how near-Earth asteroid Phaethon reflects light at different angles, astronomers think that its surface may reflect less light than previously thought. This is an exciting mystery for the recently approved DESTINY+ mission to investigate when it flies past Phaethon.
The way an object reflects light depends not only on its albedo (the percentage of light it reflects) but also on the illumination angle.
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Jay TateJust recently, a small asteroid lit up the sky over Botswana – having been discovered mere hours before it hit the Earth. Near-Earth objects (NEOs) like asteroids were the focus of a four-week conference at the Munich Institute for Astro and Particle Physics (MIAPP) in Garching.
Dr. Detlef Koschny,
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Jay TateA fireball lit up the sky above the city of Lipetsk in western Russia last week. This week, videos of the exploding meteor emerged and small meteorite fragments were found on the ground.
NASA and its scientists are part of an international effort to identify and track potentially dangerous near Earth objects,
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