Asteroids – Astronomy Now

Comet or asteroid? Hubble discovers that a unique object is a binary

22 September 2017 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope helped an international team of astronomers find that an unusual object in the asteroid belt is, in fact, two asteroids orbiting each other that have comet-like features. These include a bright halo of material, called a coma, and a long tail of dust.

OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission receives gravitational boost from planet Earth

22 September 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, en route to asteroid Bennu to retrieve samples and return them to scientists, slingshot past Earth on Friday, using gravity to change its trajectory for a rendezvous with its target late next year.

A very close encounter

15 August 2017 Astronomy Now

Back in October 2012, the near-Earth asteroid 2012 TC4 had a close encounter with Earth. It passed our planet at a distance only a quarter of that between the Earth and the Moon. In October 2017, this small asteroid, with a size of only about 15 to 30 metres, will return for another very close fly-by, making it the perfect object to test the asteroid detection and tracking network.

Planets like Earth may have had muddy origins

18 July 2017 Astronomy Now

Scientists have long held the belief that planets — including Earth — were built from rocky asteroids, but new research challenges that view.

Dawn mission managers await NASA decision on spacecraft’s future

17 June 2017 Stephen Clark

The future of NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, running low on hydrazine fuel and now flying around the dwarf planet Ceres without the help of internal pointing wheels, will be decided in the coming weeks by top space agency managers.

Earlier launch of NASA’s Psyche mission touted as cost-saving measure

26 May 2017 Stephen Clark

A NASA spacecraft set to explore a metallic asteroid for the first time will launch in 2022, a year earlier than originally planned, and reach its destination in 2026, four years ahead of schedule, giving ground teams a shorter wait for the mission’s scientific payoff and shaving $100 million off the project’s total cost, officials said Wednesday.

Gravitational wave testbed repurposed as comet dust detector

26 April 2017 Stephen Clark

In the final months of Europe’s LISA Pathfinder mission, scientists have found an unexpected use for the trailblazing testbed for a future gravitational wave observatory by tracking the tiny dings made by microscopic particles that strike the spacecraft in deep space, exploiting the impacts to learn about the population of dust grains cast off by comets and asteroids across the solar system.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe moonlights as asteroid sleuth

1 February 2017 Stephen Clark

On course to collect specimens from asteroid Bennu after its launch last year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will search this month for objects sharing an orbit with Earth, a bonus science opportunity to locate possible fragments of the primordial building blocks that formed our home planet.

Future of asteroid deflection mission to be decided soon

20 January 2017 Stephen Clark

Decisions on the future of a joint robotic mission between NASA and the European Space Agency to demonstrate the ability to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth have been put off until later this year after European governments declined to fully fund their part of the project in December.

Two asteroid missions get nod from NASA

11 January 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA has selected two robotic missions to visit asteroids in the early 2020s from a field of proposed interplanetary probes, approving projects to explore a metallic relic from the early solar system and a half-dozen so-called Trojan objects left over from the formation of the outer planets.