A US-German research team has simulated
meteorite impacts in the lab and followed the resulting structural changes in
two feldspar minerals with X-rays as they happened. The results of the
experiments at DESY and at Argonne National Laboratory in the US show that
structural changes can occur at very different pressures,

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ESA’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,

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By 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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The 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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Australians 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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On 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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Skywatchers 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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NASA’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,

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The 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,

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29 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,

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