A special United Nations team on hazardous asteroids has been dissolved after completing its task of setting up organizations to deal with planet-threatening space rocks. The UN’s Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space formally dissolved its Action Team 14,

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For many years, a rare class of so-called “active asteroids” that appear to throw off a trail of dust and debris like a comet have puzzled scientists. In 2010, a new sub-type of active asteroid was discovered that appeared to spontaneously eject a shot of dust for no apparent reason.

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NASA has just announced the selection of ARM Option B – the alternative ARM mission to pluck a boulder off a larger NEA and return it to the vicinity of the Moon. The rock could be up to 4m in size.

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NASA Wednesday announced more details in its plan for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which in the mid-2020s will test a number of new capabilities needed for future human expeditions to deep space, including to Mars. NASA also announced it has increased the detection of near-Earth Asteroids by 65 percent since launching its asteroid initiative three years ago.

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A team led by astronomers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, recently used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to observe and measure a rare class of “active asteroids” that spontaneously emit dust and have been confounding scientists for years.

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A 400 kilometre-wide impact zone from a huge meteorite that broke in two moments before it slammed into the Earth has been found in Central Australia.

The crater from the impact millions of years ago has long disappeared.

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An ancient, global-scale impact could explain the Red Planet’s mysterious “two-faced” appearance

The planet Mars has been associated with its namesake god of war for millennia, but its own past may have been more violent than was previously imagined.

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Research by New York University Biology Professor Michael Rampino concludes that Earth’s infrequent but predictable path around and through our Galaxy’s disc may have a direct and significant effect on geological and biological phenomena occurring on Earth.

In a new paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society,

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Craters and mysterious bright spots are beginning to pop out in the latest images of Ceres from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. These images, taken Feb. 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet, pose intriguing questions for the science team to explore as the spacecraft nears its destination.

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NASA performed the first Near-Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets Study (NHATS) in September/October of 2010, and 666 of the known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) were identified as meeting the NHATS criteria for mission accessibility (classifying those NEAs as “NHATS-compliant”).

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