NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.

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Numerous recent blogs and web postings are erroneously claiming that an asteroid will impact Earth, sometime between Sept. 15 and 28, 2015. On one of those dates, as rumors go, there will be an impact – “evidently” near Puerto Rico –

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The idea of panspermia — that life on Earth originated from comets or asteroids bombarding our planet — is not new. But new research may have given the theory a boost. Scientists from Japan say their experiments show that early comet impacts could have caused amino acids to change into peptides,

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Fast Facts:

* A new NASA study has traced some members of the near-Earth asteroid population back to their likely source.

* The source may be the Euphrosyne family of dark, asteroids on highly inclined (or tilted) orbits in the outer asteroid belt.

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During the first ever landing of a probe on a comet, the world held its breath as Philae survived a bouncy landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12, 2014. A special issue of Science highlights seven new studies that delve further into the data that has been transmitted back by Philae.

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Early results from Philae’s first suite of scientific observations of Comet 67P/Churyumov­-Gerasimenko were published today in a special edition of the journal Science.

Data were obtained during the lander’s seven-hour descent to its first touchdown at the Agilkia landing site,

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At the end of the Pleistocene period, some 13,000 years ago a cosmic impact triggered an abrupt cooling episode that earth scientists refer to as the Younger Dryas. New research by UC Santa Barbara geologist James Kennett and an international group of investigators has narrowed the date to a 100-year range,

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Japanese space scientists are on the hunt for a new name for an asteroid that may contain the secret of life, with a public competition beginning Wednesday.

The asteroid, which currently goes by the rather prosaic “1999 JU3”

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Maybe you have seen one of the alarming videos and emails circulating around the internet claiming that the End is Nigh. The claim is that an enormous dinosaur-killer of an asteroid is going to smash into the Earth sometime between 15-28 September 2015.

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Astronomy and science organizations declared 30 June as Asteroid Day, with plans to talk up the danger of asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth. One partner in the effort, the Sentinel mission, has an especially urgent need to drum up public support: it is struggling to raise the US$450 million it needs to launch a space telescope dedicated to finding hundreds of thousands of near-Earth objects.

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