IRON AND ICE - RADAR DAILY

Comet NEOWISE sizzles as it slides by the Sun

Jul 09, 2020 (JPL)

The comet cruised just inside Mercury's orbit on July 3. This very close passage by the Sun is cooking the comet's outermost layers, causing gas and dust to eru...

Building NASA's Psyche: Design Done, Now Full Speed Ahead on Hardware

Jul 09, 2020 (JPL)

Like all NASA missions, early work on Psyche started with drawing up digital blueprints. Then came the building of engineering models, which were tested and ret...

One galaxy, two asteroids

Jul 02, 2020 (ESA)

After closer inspection, something else comes to sight, much closer to home. Towards the lower right corner of the frame, two elongated streaks are faintly visi...

Suitcase-sized asteroid explorer

Jul 02, 2020 (ESA)

The suitcase-sized ESA's 'Miniaturised Asteroid Remote Geophysical Observer', or M-Argo will use a multispectral camera and a laser altimeter to look for astero...

Gaia revolutionises asteroid tracking

Jul 02, 2020 (ESA)

Gaia charts the galaxy by repeatedly scanning the entire sky. Over the course of its planned mission, it observed each of its more than one billion target stars...

Asteroid impact, not volcanoes, made the Earth uninhabitable for dinosaurs

Jun 30, 2020 (SPX)

The asteroid, which struck the Earth off the coast of Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous era 66 million years ago, has long been believed to be the cause of th...

Hera and its asteroid target

Jun 25, 2020 (ESA)

The newly-named Dimorphos - at 160 m across, about the size of Egypt's Great Pyramid - orbits around the main 780 m mountain-sized Didymos near-Earth asteroid. ...

Name given to asteroid target of ESA's planetary defence mission

Jun 24, 2020 (ESA)

A near-Earth binary asteroid system, named after the Greek word for 'twin', Didymos's main body measures about 780 m across, with its previously nameless moonle...

Name Approved for Target of Asteroid Deflection Missions

Jun 24, 2020 (SPX)

In July 2021, just over a year from now, NASA will launch the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission. This first full-scale demonstration of asteroid d...

Protecting Earth from asteroid impact with a tethered diversion

Jun 19, 2020 (SPX)

Methods to mitigate such a collision are highly desirable. A new paper published in EPJ Special Topics, authored by Flaviane Venditti, Planetary Radar Departmen...

SOHO spots its 4,000th Comet

Jun 18, 2020 (SPX)

The comet is nicknamed SOHO-4000, pending its official designation from the Minor Planet Center. Like most other SOHO-discovered comets, SOHO-4000 is part of th...

First Citizen Science Successes for Backyard Astronomy

Jun 12, 2020 (SPX)

After receiving an alert from SETI Institute scientists, on the night of April 9, Morand, a partner in a French strategy consulting firm, seized the opportunity...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx discovers sunlight can crack rocks on Asteroid Bennu

Jun 10, 2020 (SPX)

Rocks on asteroid Bennu appear to be cracking as sunlight heats them up during the day and they cool down at night, according to images from NASA's OSIRIS-REx (...

Ancient micrometeoroids carried specks of stardust, water to asteroid 4 Vesta

Jun 10, 2020 (SPX)

These "stardust" grains arrived on Earth inside primitive meteorites. New Washington University in St. Louis research led by Nan Liu, an assistant research prof...

OSIRIS-REx finds heat, cold fracturing rocks on Asteroid Bennu

Jun 10, 2020 (SPX)

Thermal fracturing or thermal stress weathering occurs as rocks heat and cool each day, and mechanical stresses build up that can cause cracks to develop and gr...

STEREO watches Comet ATLAS as Solar Orbiter crosses its tail

Jun 08, 2020 (SPX)

In the animated image, ATLAS emerges from the top of the frame and approaches the Sun - off camera to left - against gusts of solar wind. Its dust tail, which r...

Ancient asteroids helped synthesize life's molecular building blocks, study finds

Jun 08, 2020 (UPI)

In the lab, scientists used a stage propellant gun to simulate the violent impact featuring water and a variety of organic chemicals, including carbon dioxide, ...

OSIRIS-REx swoops over sample site Osprey

Jun 04, 2020 (SPX)

The spacecraft took these images during an 820-foot (250-meter) reconnaissance pass over the site, which is the closest Osprey has been imaged. The pass was des...

Queen's Brian May works to probe origin of asteroids

Jun 03, 2020 (ESA)

Both the 525-m diameter Bennu asteroid visited by NASA's OSIRIS-REx and 1-km diameter Ryugu asteroid reached by Japan's Hayabusa2 possess the same distinct spin...

Solar Orbiter to pass through tails of Comet ATLAS

Jun 02, 2020 (ESA)

Solar Orbiter was launched on 10 February 2020. Since then, and with the exception of a brief shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, scientists and engineers...