Photo: This illustration made available by Johns Hopkins APL and NASA depicts NASA’s DART probe, foreground right, and Italian Space Agency’s (ASI) LICIACube, bottom right, at the Didymos system before impact with the asteroid Dimorphos In the first-of-its kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away. A
Artist’s evidence-based depiction of the blast, which had the power of 1,000 Hiroshimas. Allen West and Jennifer Rice, CC BY-ND Christopher R. Moore, University of South Carolina As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea
Whew, now here’s some good cosmic news: NASA has given Earth the all clear for the next century from a particularly menacing asteroid. The space agency announced this week that new telescope observations have ruled out any chance of Apophis smacking Earth in 2068. That’s the same 1,100-foot (340-meter) space rock that was supposed to
Officials from Japan’s space agency said Tuesday they have found more than the anticipated amount of soil and gases inside a small capsule the country’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft brought back from a distant asteroid this month, a mission they praised as a milestone in planetary research. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said its staff initially spotted
After more than a decade of work, $800 million and 200 million miles of space travel, it all came down to six seconds. That’s how long OSIRIS-REx spent on the surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu, collecting a small sample of soil before lifting off again for a return trip to Earth. But those six seconds
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