A small asteroid entered Earth’s atmosphere and burned up early Sunday morning as it hurled through the skies above eastern Germany. Videos shared on social media throughout the day showed the glowing object’s descent over Europe, shortly after the Hungarian researcher and self-described “asteroid hunter” Krisztián Sárneczky spotted it from an observatory in Hungary. Sárneczky […]
Who doesn’t love showing off their collection of cool rocks? NASA was last week after struggling with it for a couple of months, and now, it’s sharing a look at what’s inside. The space agency published a high-resolution image of the newly opened Touch-and-Go-Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) on Friday, revealing all the dust and rocks […]
For months, bits of an asteroid collected by a U.S. probe during a billion-mile trek were out of reach to scientists, locked inside a return capsule in a NASA facility with two stuck fasteners preventing access to the rocky space treasure. This week, NASA won its battle against those fasteners. On Wednesday (Jan. 10), NASA […]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Two stubborn fasteners trapped invaluable material sampled from an asteroid — but after a monthslong process, it has finally been released, NASA announced Thursday. The space agency already harvested about 2.5 ounces (70 grams) of […]
Moving across the country can feel like the end of the world, but for one fictional family in the 2021 disaster film Asteroid (streaming now on Peacock), the association was a little more literal. When the three of them (Spencer, Lynn, and Zoe) leave their hectic life in the big city for a simpler one […]
NASA’s asteroid sampling spacecraft OSRIS-APEX will have an exciting new mission in 2029, when it will watch an exciting asteroid encounter like no other in recorded human history. The craft, formerly known as OSIRIS-REx, will bear witness as the asteroid Apophis— named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos— comes so close to our planet that it […]
For generations, Western space missions have largely occurred out in the open. We knew where they were going, why they were going there and what they planned to do. But the world is on the verge of a new era in which private interests override such openness, with big money potentially on the line. Sometime […]
In 2020, the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 visited the asteroid Ryugu and managed to bring precious samples of the space rock back to Earth. And sure enough, years later, we are still gaining insights about this small asteroid and the environment in which it formed thanks to those samples. Today, scientists released the latest findings from […]
Tasked with finding clues about origins of life on Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft scooped up pieces of a rugged, rubble-pile asteroid named Bennu in late 2020 and delivered them to Earth about two months ago. On Monday (Dec. 11), scientists got their first detailed description of some of that extraterrestrial collection. “We definitely have hydrated, organic-rich remnants from the […]