While our census of hazardous NEOs is not nearly complete, we do have reliable maps of nearly all of the potentially hazardous asteroids larger than a kilometer (0.6 mile) across.
Some of the asteroids NASA's Lucy mission will visit are still more than 330 million miles away from the spacecraft, but despite the great distance and the comparatively small sizes, Lucy caught views of four of its targets in late March.
NASA's scientist, James Garvin, thinks we might have been misreading traces of some of the more serious asteroid strikes that have occurred within the past million years. If he's right, the odds of being hit by something nasty could be higher.
An international team has analyzed samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu in 2018 by the Hayabusa2 mission and found uracil, one of the five key bases of the RNA and DNA molecules that are crucial to life as we know it.
Humanity’s first attempt to purposely change the motion of asteroid was a success. The DART mission shows that NASA is trying to be ready for whatever the universe throws at us in future.
Geoscientists have now discovered areas with a massive accumulation of rare earths and unexpected structures.
An international team of researchers studying dust samples retrieved by the Hayabusa-2 space probe, has found that some of its dust grains are older than the solar system.
Japanese researchers have discovered more than 20 amino acids on the space rock Ryugu, which is more than 200 million miles (320 million kilometers) from Earth.
In 2014, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA launched the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to visit asteroid Ryugu. It arrived at the asteroid in June 2018 and studied it from orbit for over a year.
Astronomers already knew Earth had one Trojan. Now we know it has two, with the second announced on February 1, 2022. This new Earth Trojan has been labeled 2020 XL5.
There was a huge weakness in our asteroid defense system when only one of the hemispheres was covered by telescopes that constantly scan the sky. Now NASA funded two more telescopes in the southern hemisphere.
Working alongside its northern-hemisphere partner telescope, the ESAs Test-Bed Telescope 2 (TBT2) at La Silla Observatory in Chile will keep a close eye on the sky for asteroids that could pose a risk to Earth.
Asteroid 99942 Apophis had been identified as one of the most hazardous asteroids. The near-Earth object was thought to pose a slight risk of impacting Earth in 2068, but now radar observations have ruled that out.
Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. They could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system.
The container with material from a space rock called Ryugu parachuted down near Woomera in South Australia on Saturday evening. The samples were originally collected by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa-2.
