NEA Scout will visit an asteroid estimated to be smaller than a school bus – the smallest asteroid ever to be studied by a spacecraft.

Launching with the Artemis I uncrewed test flight, NASA’s shoebox-size Near-Earth Asteroid Scout will chase down what will become the smallest asteroid ever to be visited by a spacecraft.

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This is a surprisingly good piece in the Sun!

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17253271/brit-tracks-nearby-asteroids-nasa-save-humanity-apocalypse/

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Earlier, NASA said that Apophis – the poster child for “hazardous asteroids” – was no longer deemed a threat for Earth based on a refined estimate of its orbit around the Sun.

Asteroid 99942 Apophis, estimated to measure 340 metres (1,100 ft) across and identified by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as one of the most hazardous asteroids that could impact Earth,

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A new University of Liverpool study has found that the minerology of the rocks that a meteorite hits, rather than the size of the impact, determines how deadly an impact it will have.

The earth has been bombarded by meteorites throughout its long history. Meteorite impacts generate atmospheric dust and cover the Earth’s surface with debris and have long been considered as a trigger of mass extinctions through Earth’s history.

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For Hollywood A-listers Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, their new end-of-the-world comedy was a chance to send a little respect back to scientists.

In “Don’t Look Up”, released on December 24 on Netflix, they play two astronomers who discover a comet will wipe out life on Earth within six months,

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The new system improves the capabilities of NASA JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies to assess the impact risk of asteroids that can come close to our planet.

To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky,

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The world will be watching the milestone launch of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, DART, spacecraft on Wednesday, 24 November, intended to alter one small part of the Solar System forever.

DART will collide with the small moon of an asteroid in order to shift its orbit around its parent body –

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Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno.

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The University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) received a $15 million NASA grant to continue its world-leading efforts to discover Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) and Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs).

IfA’s Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) atop Haleakala currently finds nearly as many NEOs and PHAs as the rest of the world’s observatories combined,

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The idea of avoiding asteroid impacts has featured prominently in the public’s mind for decades – especially since the release of Deep Impact and Armageddon.  But is using a nuclear explosion the best way to deal with potentially hazardous space rocks?  Decidedly not.  If given enough time, there is a much more effective (and safer) way to dealing with any object on a collision course with Earth – a gravity tractor. 

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