A house-sized asteroid will shave past our planet on October 12, far inside the Moon’s orbit but without posing any threat, astronomers said Thursday.

The space rock will zoom by harmlessly at a distance of about 44,000 kilometres (27,300 miles) —

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NASA scientists are excited about the upcoming close flyby of a small asteroid and plan to use its upcoming October close approach to Earth as an opportunity not only for science, but to test NASA’s network of observatories and scientists who work with planetary defense.

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Astronomers discovered a small asteroid – now designated as asteroid 2017 OO1 – on July 23. That was 3 days after it passed 1/3 the moon’s distance from Earth.

A space rock now designated as asteroid 2017 OO1 was detected on July 23,

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Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many “long-period comets” will never approach the Sun in a person’s lifetime.

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The origin and nature of Mars is mysterious. It has geologically distinct hemispheres, with smooth lowlands in the north and cratered, high-elevation terrain in the south. The red planet also has two small oddly-shaped oblong moons and a composition that sets it apart from that of the Earth.

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This tiny, perfect mission has not only proven the technology needed to detect gravity waves in the future full LISA mission, it has also gone looking for asteroids!

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids that come close to Earth that could potentially impact our planet,

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In August 2015, ESO and the European Space Agency (ESA) signed a cooperation agreement setting the terms and conditions for mutual cooperation and the exchange of scientific research information between the two organisations. The first project to be implemented under this cooperation agreement is the deployment of a Test-Bed Telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in northern Chile.

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NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, 28 were near-Earth objects, 64 were main belt asteroids and five were comets.

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The first-ever mission to demonstrate an asteroid deflection technique for planetary defense – the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – is moving from concept development to preliminary design phase, following NASA’s approval on June 23.

“DART would be NASA’s first mission to demonstrate what’s known as the kinetic impactor technique –

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On the first day of the year 1801, Italian astronomer Gioacchino Giuseppe Maria Ubaldo Nicolo Piazzi found a previously uncharted “tiny star” near the constellation of Taurus. The following night Piazzi again observed this newfound celestial object, discovering that the speck had changed its position relative to the nearby stars.

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