Newly Discovered Comet Is Likely Interstellar Visitor A newly discovered comet has excited the astronomical community this week because it appears to have originated from outside the solar system. The object – designated C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) – was discovered on Aug. 30, 2019, by Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea. The official […]

Small Asteroid of Concern will Safely Pass Next Month The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has determined with new analysis by its Sentry impact monitoring system that a small asteroid whose uncertain position was of concern will pass by Earth at a very safe distance in September. The new analysis of the asteroid, called […]

Largest Close Approaching Asteroid in a Century Passes by Earth On the evening of Thursday, July 24, a football-field-sized asteroid passed close to the Earth with very little warning. The asteroid, designated 2019 OK, approached Earth at about 44,000 miles (71,000 kilometers) above the surface, one fifth the distance to the Moon. Other known asteroids […]

NASA Tracked Small Asteroid Before It Broke up in Atmosphere When a lightning detector on a NOAA weather satellite detected something that wasn’t lightning last Saturday, a scientist at the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, did some detective work. NASA CNEOS Go to Source

Scientists Planning Now for Asteroid Flyby a Decade Away On April 13, 2029, a speck of light will streak across the sky, getting brighter and faster. At one point it will travel more than the width of the full Moon within a minute and it will get as bright as the stars in the Little […]

NASA, FEMA, International Partners Plan Asteroid Impact Exercise While headlines routinely report on “close shaves” and “near-misses” when near-Earth objects (NEOs) such as asteroids or comets pass relatively close to Earth, the real work of preparing for the possibility of a NEO impact with Earth goes on mostly out of the public eye. NASA CNEOS […]

Holiday Asteroid Imaged with NASA Radar The December 2018 close approach by the large, near-Earth asteroid 2003 SD220 has provided astronomers an outstanding opportunity to obtain detailed radar images of the surface and shape of the object and to improve the understanding of its orbit. NASA CNEOS Go to Source

See a Passing Comet This Sunday On Sunday, Dec. 16, the comet known as 46P/Wirtanen will make one of the 10 closest comet flybys of Earth in 70 years, and you may even be able to see it without a telescope. NASA CNEOS Go to Source

Planetary Defense: The Bennu Experiment On Dec. 3, after traveling billions of kilometers from Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached its target, Bennu, and kicked off a nearly two-year, up-close investigation of the asteroid. It will inspect nearly every square inch of this ancient clump of rubble left over from the formation of our solar system. […]

A Tiny Asteroid Will Pass Very Close to Earth on Saturday A very small asteroid discovered on Nov. 29 is on a path which will bring it very close to Earth on the evening of Dec. 1, but there is no chance that the asteroid could impact our planet. Only about 3 meters (15 feet) […]

NASA Learns More About Interstellar Visitor ‘Oumuamua In November 2017, scientists pointed NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope toward the object known as ‘Oumuamua – the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. The infrared Spitzer was one of many telescopes pointed at ‘Oumuamua in the weeks after its discovery that October. NASA CNEOS Go […]

NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies Enters Third Decade. On March 11, 1998, asteroid astronomers around the world received an ominous message: new observational data on the recently discovered asteroid 1997 XF11 suggested there was a chance that the half-mile-wide (nearly one kilometer) object could hit Earth in 2028. Powered by WPeMatico

Using observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, an international team of scientists has confirmed ‘Oumuamua (oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah), the first known interstellar object to travel through our solar system, got an unexpected boost in speed and shift in trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year. Powered by WPeMatico

A new multiagency report outlines how the U.S. could become better prepared for near-Earth objects — asteroids and comets whose orbits come within 30 million miles of Earth — otherwise known as NEOs. While no known NEOs currently pose significant risks of impact, the report is a key step to addressing a nationwide response to […]

A boulder-sized asteroid designated 2018 LA was discovered Saturday morning, June 2, and was determined to be on a collision course with Earth, with impact just hours away. Because it was very faint, the asteroid was estimated to be only about 6 feet (2 meters) across, which is small enough that it was expected to […]

Asteroid 2010 WC9 will make a close approach to Earth today (5/15/18) at 3:04 p.m. PDT (6:04 p.m. EDT, 22:04 UTC). At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will be no closer to Earth’s surface than about 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers), which is about half the distance between Earth and the Moon. 2010 WC9 […]

Several news stories circulating over the past week reporting on the possibility of asteroid Bennu impacting the Earth need some correction. Powered by WPeMatico

The house-sized asteroid entered the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk at over eleven miles per second and blew apart 14 miles above the ground. The explosion released the energy equivalent of around 440,000 tons of TNT and generated a shock wave that blew out windows over 200 square miles and damaged some buildings. Over 1,600 people were […]

Two small asteroids recently discovered by astronomers at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) near Tucson, Arizona, are safely passing by Earth within one lunar distance this week. Powered by WPeMatico

2002 AJ129 is an intermediate-sized near-Earth asteroid, somewhere between 0.3 miles (0.5 kilometers) and 0.75 miles (1.2 kilometers) across. It was discovered on Jan. 15, 2002, by the former NASA-sponsored Near Earth Asteroid Tracking project at the Maui Space Surveillance Site on Haleakala, Hawaii. The asteroid’s velocity at the time of closest approach, 76,000 mph […]