January 2019
Visiting an asteroid to find out how life began
... arrived at the end of June. Official arrival at Ryugu was declared when Hayabusa2 reached a distance of 20 km from the asteroid. This is designated the ‘home position’ and the default location of Hayabusa2 in the vicinity of Ryugu. Arriving on June...
01 July 2016
Asteroid Day was celebrated on June 30 – but what was it all about?
... and broader community events, to raise public awareness of the need for increased detection and tracking of asteroids. The 100x Asteroid Declaration, calling for this action, has been signed by hundreds of astronauts, scientists, artists and leaders...
08 September 2016
Close encounters of the asteroid kind: 2016 RB1 passes remarkably close to Earth
... by Venus before returning to Earth in June 2020. None of these fly-bys are expected to end in impact. The asteroid was discovered on September 5th by the Cassegrain reflector telescope at Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona, US. According to NASA, the...
17 April 2017
April 19th to be an exciting day for stargazers as an asteroid and a comet pass close to Earth
...five times less than the distance to the Moon. The asteroid will approach Earth after flying around the Sun and will...400 years, and won't be back again until after 2600. The asteroid was discovered in May 2014 by scientists at the Catalina Sky Survey ...
23 May 2018
First permanent extrasolar asteroid found near Jupiter
... of its kind to be discovered, it is unlikely to be the last. To run the simulations, Namouni and Morais created a million virtual asteroid clones moving under the same conditions to see what happened to them all. Most remained in a stable orbit...
29 June 2018
All things asteroid: Who, What, Where and When
... Redirection Test (DART) project. DART’s primary objective is to demonstrate the effect a kinetic impact would have on a small asteroid. To achieve this, DART will deliberately smash itself into a 160 metre moonlet informally called ‘Didymoon,’ that...
