NASA is preparing to launch its first mission to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth. The mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth.

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How do you study the topography of an asteroid millions of miles away? Map it with a robotic cartographer!

NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx, will launch in September 2016 and travel to a near-Earth asteroid known as Bennu to harvest a sample of surface material and return it to Earth for study.

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Observers are looking forward to an annual event that’s expected to turn into a “meteor storm” on Friday morning.

The Perseid shower occurs every August but this year scientists say a gravitational push by Jupiter will make it more intense.

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An asteroid named Bennu could one day strike our planet. A new space mission could help us learn how to stop it.

Discovered in 1999, 101955 Bennu is roughly 1,640 feet in diameter and orbits the Sun at a speed of 63,000 miles per hour.

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Detailed analysis of data collected by Rosetta show that comets are the ancient leftovers of early Solar System formation, and not younger fragments resulting from subsequent collisions between other, larger bodies. Understanding how and when objects like Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko took shape is of utmost importance in determining how exactly they can be used to interpret the formation and early evolution of our Solar System.

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Earth bid a final farewell to robot lab Philae on Wednesday, severing communications after a year-long silence from the pioneering probe hurtling through space on a comet.

Writing an extraordinary chapter in space history, the washing machine-sized craft was the first to land on a comet —

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Ceres is covered in countless small, young craters, but none are larger than 175 miles (280 kilometers) in diameter. To scientists, this is a huge mystery, given that the dwarf planet must have been hit by numerous large asteroids during its 4.5 billion-year lifetime.

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One of the Moon’s biggest craters was created by an asteroid more than 250km (150 miles) across, a study suggests.

It smashed into the lunar surface about 3.8 billion years ago, forming Mare Imbrium – the feature also known as the right eye of the “Man in the Moon”.

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Dinosaurs were fearsome creatures. Some had thick scales, sharp teeth, and, in may cases, lightning-fast reflexes. One thing they didn’t have: a planetary defense office. When an asteroid targeted Earth 65 million years ago, it took those masters of Earth by complete surprise.

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Following its historic first-ever flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons mission has received the green light to fly onward to an object deeper in the Kuiper Belt, known as 2014 MU69. The spacecraft’s planned rendezvous with the ancient object –

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