Two comets that will safely fly past Earth later this month may have more in common than their intriguingly similar orbits. They may be twins of a sort.

Comet P/2016 BA14 was discovered on Jan. 22, 2016, by the University of Hawaii’s PanSTARRS telescope on Haleakala,

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Peering down at the Earth’s atmosphere from a research window aboard the International Space Station, a new science instrument launching Tuesday will compose unprecedented characterizations of the chemical makeup of shooting stars.

Called METEOR, the Meteor Composition Determination experiment will take high-resolution video and images of Earth and uses a software program to filter out bright spots,

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In 1967, a hexagonal form of diamond, later named lonsdaleite, was identified for the first time inside fragments of the Canyon Diablo meteorite, the asteroid that created the Barringer Crater in Arizona. Since then, occurrences of lonsdaleite and nanometer-sized diamonds have been speculated to serve as a marker for meteorite impacts,

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At the Palomar Observatory near San Diego, astronomers are busy tinkering with a high-tech instrument that could discover a variety of objects both far from Earth and closer to home.

The Caltech HIgh-speed Multi-color camERA (CHIMERA) system is looking for objects in the Kuiper Belt,

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Asteroid 2013 TX68 will come fairly close to Earth in early March, but the exact time and distance of its closest approach will not be known until after the fact.

Sean Marshall, a fifth-year Cornell University PhD student,

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Potentially hazardous asteroid are still looming large in the minds of scientists engaged in planetary defense issues. Numerous strategies describing deflection of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) have been proposed, including methods employing kinetic impactors, robotic mining or gravity tractors. However, one of the proposed concepts has been lately reconsidered by a team of researchers,

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Scientists at Tomsk State University’s Institute of Applied Mathematics and Mechanics have calculated how to blow up an asteroid with a diameter of 200 meters using nuclear power, while also making sure that dangerously irradiated fragments of the asteroid do not land on Earth.

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A new analysis of lava from the deep mantle indicates that water-soaked dust particles, rather than a barrage of icy comets, asteroids, or other bodies, delivered water to the newly forming Earth.

Although existing theories of where Earth’s water comes from assume that ice-rich comets or asteroids hit the planet after it formed,

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Additional observations of asteroid 2013 TX68 have been obtained, refining its orbital path and moving the date of the asteroid’s Earth flyby from March 5 to March 8.

The observations, from archived images provided by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS asteroid survey,

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Asteroids headed for a collision with the Earth, if found early enough, can be acted upon to prevent the potentially devastating consequences of an impact. One technique to divert an asteroid, called kinetic impact, uses a spacecraft to crash into the body at high speeds.

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