NASA has formalized its ongoing program for detecting and tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs) as the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO). The office remains within NASA’s Planetary Science Division, in the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The office will be responsible for supervision of all NASA-funded projects to find and characterize asteroids and comets that pass near Earth’s orbit around the sun.

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Royal Astronomical Society press release (On behalf of Armagh Observatory and the University of Buckingham)

A team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory and the University of Buckingham report that the discovery of hundreds of giant comets in the outer planetary system over the last two decades means that these objects pose a much greater hazard to life than asteroids.

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NASA scientists calculate that asteroid 163899, also known as 2003 SD220, will make its closest approach to Earth on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2015.

The asteroid is rather large, thought to measure between 0.5 and 1.5 miles wide.

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The asteroid that killed the nonavian dinosaurs may have also killed countless marine animals after it triggered a worldwide algal bloom, a new study finds.

The infamous 6-mile-long (10 kilometers) asteroid hit Earth about 66 million years ago,

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A Japanese space probe picked up just the right amount of speed when it flew by Earth earlier this month, using the planet’s gravity to slingshot toward an asteroid scientists think is a primordial leftover from the ancient solar system,

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New research may draw a ‘curtain of fire’ on dinosaur extinction theory. The role volcanic activity played in mass extinction events in the Earth’s early history is likely to have been much less severe than previously thought, according to a study led by the University of Leeds.

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Astronomers have found the most distant object ever in our solar system, three times farther away than Pluto. The dwarf planet, which has been designated V774104, is between 500 and 1000 kilometers across. It will take another year before scientists pin down its orbit,

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A new study has shown that meteorite impacts on ancient oceans may have created nucleobases and amino acids. Researchers from Tohoku University, National Institute for Materials Science and Hiroshima University discovered this after conducting impact experiments simulating a meteorite hitting an ancient ocean.

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The main-belt asteroid (493) Griseldis was probably hit by another object last March. The results were reported on November 12 at the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society near Washington, DC.

Observations taken with the 8-meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea on 17 March 2015 UT showed that the main-belt asteroid (493) Griseldis had “an extended feature,”

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