Three federal entities, including NASA, are reaffirming their commitment to search for Antarctic meteorites, to help learn more about the primitive building blocks of the solar system and answer questions about Earth’s neighbors like the moon and Mars.

NASA,

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What would we do if we discovered a large asteroid on course to impact Earth? While highly unlikely, that was the high-consequence scenario discussed by attendees at an Oct. 25 NASA-FEMA tabletop exercise in El Segundo, California.

The third in a series of exercises hosted jointly by NASA and FEMA —

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Everyone knows it was a large asteroid striking Earth that led to the demise of the dinosaurs. But how many near misses were there? Modern humans have been around for about 225,000 years, so we must have come close to death by asteroid more than once in our time.

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The number of discovered near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) now tops 15,000, with an average of 30 new discoveries added each week. This milestone marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known NEAs since 2013, when discoveries reached 10,000 in August of that year.

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Scientists have discovered possible evidence for water-rich minerals on the surface of the largest metallic asteroid in the solar system, according to a study by the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA.

The asteroid, called Psyche, is 186 miles across and is made of almost pure nickel-iron metal.

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At a mountaintop in New Mexico, DARPA is marking the formal transition of its Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) from an Agency-led design and construction program to ownership and operation by U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), which has announced plans to operate the telescope in Australia jointly with the Australian government.

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A team of scientists led by Universities Space Research Association’s David Kring at the Lunar and Planetary Institute is using observations of the Moon to further understand the impact on Earth that is linked to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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In a new study, scientists say they have found evidence along the New Jersey coast that an extraterrestrial object hit the earth at the same time a mysterious release of carbon dioxide suddenly warmed the planet, some 55.6 million years ago.

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A comet impact 55 million years ago may have helped mammals dominate the Earth.

It could have triggered a rapid phase of global warming linked to the expansion of mammal groups during the Eocene time period.

Writing in the journal Science,

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A comet strike may have triggered the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a rapid warming of the Earth caused by an accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide 56 million years ago, which offers analogs to global warming today. Sorting through samples of sediment from the time period,

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