Following the success of its mission to Mars, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) plans to send a new spacecraft to an asteroid belt to investigate the history of the solar system and the potential origins of life. The aim is for the Emirates Mission to the Asteroid Belt (EMA) to visit its first asteroid in…
NASA has launched a spacecraft on a mission to test technology that could one day alter the course of a hazardous asteroid heading toward Earth. The DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Vandenberg Space Force Base on the California coast at 10:21 p.m. PT., with the liftoff…
Astronomers have gotten their closest look yet at an unusually shaped asteroid orbiting the sun in the asteroid belt located between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. The strange asteroid, named Kleopatra, was recently imaged in the most detail to date using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The image below shows the…
This mosaic of Bennu was created using observations made by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that was in close proximity to the asteroid for over two years. NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona The spacecraft OSIRIS-REx spent two years close to asteroid Bennu before leaving earlier this year, and now researchers have predicted there is a very small chance the…
This photo shows the view from inside the dome of NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility during a night of observing. The 3.2-meter (10.5-foot) telescope atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea will be used to measure the infrared spectrum of asteroid 2001 FO32. UH/IfA An asteroid will be whipping past Earth on March 21, coming within just five times…