The "NEO Hunter" mission would use Blue Origin's Blue Ring spacecraft to deflect space rocks. This plan builds on NASA's successful DART mission, which proved an asteroid's path could be altered.
We could deflect potentially hazardous asteroids by using an enormous magnet to gently pull them apart. This idea avoids some of the pitfalls of the more traditional kinetic impactor method, which ...
Five asteroids, including one the size of a house, will approach Earth within the next two days. On Wednesday, March 25, the asteroids, the size of a car, an airplane, and two more the size of buses, ...
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the formation of our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago. In the beginning, everything was a massive cloud of gas and dust. Gravity pulled this material ...
On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in context: ...
One debate about the origin of life on Earth concerns whether it formed around deep-sea hydrothermal vents or in scars left behind by an asteroid impact. A new review article analyzes recent research ...
Asteroids are some of the oldest objects in the solar system: leftovers from the chaotic time when planets were assembling from dust and rock. They're time capsules, preserving clues about what the ...
In 2022, a NASA spacecraft intentionally barreled into the tiny asteroid Dimorphos during a planetary defense test. The objective was to assess whether humanity could protect Earth from cosmic threats ...
New data about the DART spacecraft’s effects adds evidence that Earth could be defended from future deadly asteroids by diverting their orbits. By Katrina Miller In 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a ...
Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck stopped a Texas-sized asteroid from crashing into the Earth in the 1998 science-fiction movie “Armageddon.” But a NASA expert said recently the greatest concern isn’t the ...
Our planet is currently defenseless against “city killer” asteroids, noting “we don’t know where they are,” a leading scientist has warned this week. Astronomer Kelly Fast, NASA’s planetary defense ...