IRON AND ICE

News About Asteroids And Comets

2,240 articles

Life's building blocks in Bennu samples
Jan 30, 2025 (SPX)
Asteroids, small airless bodies within the inner Solar System, are theorized to have contributed water and chemical building blocks of life to Earth billions of...
ESA Monitoring Potential Threat from Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 YR4
Jan 30, 2025 (SPX)
Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first detected on December 27, 2024, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile. Followi...
Traces of ancient brine discovered on the asteroid Bennu contain minerals crucial to life
Jan 30, 2025 (SPX)
In a paper published, Jan. 29, in the journal Nature, scientists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History describe a sequence of evaporated miner...
Berkeley Lab helps explore mysteries of Asteroid Bennu
Jan 30, 2025 (SPX)
Berkeley Lab is one of more than 40 institutions investigating Bennu's chemical makeup to better understand how our solar system and planets evolved. In a new s...
Major component of NASA's NEO Surveyor enters deep space testing
Jan 23, 2025 (SPX)
Built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, the enclosure was transported to NASA Johnson in November 2024. The NEO Surveyor mission...
Bright Comet's Tail Dazzles in Images from ESA/NASA SOHO Spacecraft
Jan 23, 2025 (SPX)
These views of comet ATLAS were captured by SOHO's LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph) instrument, which uses a disk to cover the Sun's surface an...
Asteroid impact sulfur release less lethal in dinosaur extinction
Jan 17, 2025 (SPX)
Previous studies have highlighted sulfur as the critical element driving global cooling and extinction following the impact. However, estimates of the sulfur re...
Quadrantid Meteor Shower offers 'perfect New Year treat'
Jan 06, 2025 (SPX)
Stargazers will have a chance to catch a glimpse of the Quadrantids between now and 12 January 2025. However, the peak time to get the best look will be on 3 Ja...
UCF scientists examine unique asteroid-comet hybrid
Dec 26, 2024 (SPX)
Chiron belongs to the class of objects that astronomers call "Centaurs." Centaurs are space objects that orbit the Sun between Jupiter and Neptune. They are aki...
Lab experiments explore origins of gullies on Asteroid Vesta
Dec 23, 2024 (SPX)
A recent NASA-funded study, published in the Planetary Science Journal, suggests that meteoroid impacts on Vesta could have melted subsurface brines, resulting ...
Webb Telescope detects new population of small Main Belt Asteroids
Dec 23, 2024 (SPX)
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used Webb's observations of the star TRAPPIST-1 to identify 138 new asteroids ranging in size from a...
How to find a comet before it hits Earth
Dec 20, 2024 (SPX)
A: You look for its footprint. This is the basis of research led by Samantha Hemmelgarn, a first-year doctoral student in Northern Arizona University's Departme...
Webb offers best glimpse ever into the icy planetesimals of the early solar system
Dec 20, 2024 (SPX)
The findings, published in Nature Astronomy, reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the regi...
Lucy completes key Earth gravity assist maneuver
Dec 13, 2024 (SPX)
The maneuver marks Lucy's second Earth gravity assist, coming three years into its ambitious 12-year journey. Lucy's first such maneuver, on Oct. 16, 2022, tran...
It's an Asteroid, it's a Comet, it's the Geminids Meteor Shower!
Dec 13, 2024 (SPX)
Where Did the Geminids Originate and What Makes it Different? The debris causing the Geminids originated from an asteroid known as 3200 Phaethon. After astronom...
NASA research uncovers expanding dark comet populations
Dec 10, 2024 (SPX)
The concept of dark comets emerged after the 2016 study of "asteroid" 2003 RM, whose unexpected orbital deviation could not be explained by known asteroid dynam...
MIT astronomers find the smallest asteroids ever detected in the main belt
Dec 10, 2024 (SPX)
In contrast, much smaller asteroids, about the size of a bus, can strike Earth more frequently, every few years. These "decameter" asteroids, measuring just ten...
China observatory documents asteroid before entering Earth's atmosphere
Dec 08, 2024 (SPX)
The Lijiang branch of the CAS Yunnan Observatories detected asteroid 2024 XA1 at 13:55 Beijing time on December 3 using its advanced 2.4-meter telescope. Hours ...
PSI researchers confirm new main-belt comet
Dec 05, 2024 (SPX)
Main-belt comets are icy objects found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - rather than the cold outer Solar System where icy bodies are typically ex...
Massive asteroid strikes left no lasting impact on Earth's climate
Dec 05, 2024 (SPX)
The asteroids struck Earth about 25,000 years apart during the late Eocene epoch. The larger of the two created the 60-mile-wide (100km) Popigai crater, while t...
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