IRON AND ICE - RADAR DAILY

NASA's first asteroid sample-collector arrives at target, Bennu

Dec 03, 2018 (AFP)

The $800 million unmanned mission, known as OSIRIS-REx, made a rendez-vous with the asteroid at around 12:10 pm (1710 GMT), firing its engines a final time. "We...

Taking the Measure of an Asteroid

Dec 03, 2018 (SPX)

A flyby taking place Dec. 4 will also be good practice for 2020, when the spacecraft will deploy its retractable arm to grab material from the asteroid's surfac...

NASA provides live coverage of OSIRIS-REx arrival at Asteroid Bennu

Nov 30, 2018 (SPX)

NASA will air a live event from 11:45 am to 12:15 pm EST to highlight the arrival of the agency's first asteroid sample return mission. The program will origina...

Detective mission to characterize and trace the history of a new African meteorite

Nov 28, 2018 (SPX)

News of the event in this remote area was brought to the attention of a Wits Geosciences graduate, Tim Marais, who was travelling in the area a few days after t...

NASA's Lucy in the Sky with... Asteroids?

Nov 26, 2018 (SPX)

Most of these leftover objects were then lost, as shifts in the orbits of the giant planets scattered them to the distant outer reaches of the solar system or b...

Odd bodies, rapid spins keep cosmic rings close

Nov 23, 2018 (SPX)

"Rings appear around Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus, but scientists found rings around Chariklo and Haumea within the last few years. Chariklo and Haumea w...

NASA OSIRIS-REx flexes its arm before arriving at Asteroid Bennu

Nov 19, 2018 (SPX)

Lockheed Martin engineers on the Mission Support Area (MSA) team moved TAGSAM's arm through the full range of motion of all its "joints"-shoulder, elbow and wri...

TAGSAM testing complete: OSIRIS-REx prepared to TAG an asteroid

Nov 17, 2018 (SPX)

As planned, engineers at Lockheed Martin commanded the spacecraft to move the arm through its full range of motion - flexing its shoulder, elbow, and wrist "joi...

Meteorite crater discovered under Greenland ice

Nov 15, 2018 (SPX)

The group, led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen's Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark worked for the past three year...

NASA learns more about interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua

Nov 15, 2018 (JPL)

'Oumuamua was too faint for Spitzer to detect when it looked more than two months after the object's closest approach to Earth in early September. However, the ...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx executes fourth asteroid approach maneuver

Nov 14, 2018 (SPX)

The ACS thrusters are capable of velocity changes as small as 0.02 mph (0.01 m/sec). The mission team will continue to examine telemetry and tracking data over ...

Dawn falls silent as a successful mission comes to an end

Nov 12, 2018 (SPX)

Since reaching the asteroid in 2015, the space probe has beamed back breathtaking images and fascinating information. The mission had already been extended seve...

Cosmic Detective Work: Why We Care About Space Rocks

Nov 08, 2018 (JPL)

Those clues come in the form of asteroids, comets and other small objects. Like detectives sifting through forensic evidence, scientists carefully examine these...

Aboard the first spacecraft to the Trojan asteroids

Nov 07, 2018 (SPX)

Ralph, however, is not an impossibly accomplished astronaut - it is a scientific instrument that has made many discoveries since it first launched aboard the Ne...

Scientists push back against Harvard 'alien spacecraft' theory

Nov 06, 2018 (AFP)

The researchers noted in a pre-print of the article that it was an "exotic scenario," but that "Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to ...

NASA'S OSIRIS-REx zooms in on Bennu

Nov 05, 2018 (SPX)

The spacecraft was approximately 27,340 miles (44,000 km) from Bennu for the first image - a distance several thousand miles greater than the circumference of t...

New insights on comet tails are blowing in the solar wind

Nov 05, 2018 (SPX)

First up: STEREO-B. The screen blinked, but instead of the vast starfield they expected, a pearly white, feathery smear - like an angel's wing - filled the fram...

Dawn Mission to Asteroid Belt comes to end

Nov 02, 2018 (JPL)

The Dawn spacecraft launched 11 years ago to visit the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt. Currently, it's in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, wh...

NASA's Dawn asteroid mission ends as fuel runs out

Nov 01, 2018 (AFP)

Scientists have known for about a month that Dawn was essentially out of hydrazine, the fuel that kept the spacecraft's antennae oriented toward Earth and helpe...

OSIRIS-REx captures 'super-resolution' view of Bennu

Oct 31, 2018 (SPX)

The spacecraft was moving as it captured the images with the PolyCam camera, and Bennu rotated 1.2 degrees during the nearly one minute that elapsed between the...