Space Station Threshold

A prototype telescope with an enhanced ability to find moving objects will soon be operational, and its mission will be to detect asteroids and comets that could someday pose a threat to Earth. The system is called Pan-STARRS (for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) located on Haleakala mountain in Maui,Hawaii, and is the [...]

Ever since our recent encounter with asteroid 2008 TC3 — the first asteroid that was correctly predicted to hit our planet — I've had impact craters on the brain. Earth has about 175 known impact craters, but surely our planet has endured more bashing than that in its history. All the [...]

A month after asteroid 2008 TC3 hit the Earth's atmosphere, the first ground-based image of the event has surfaced on the Internet. Admittedly, it's not the fireball everyone has been waiting to see, but it is visual evidence that something hit us above Sudan on October 7th. The image above was taken from a frame [...]

Was there a third Martian moon orbiting the planet? Did Phobos and Deimos have a triplet sibling? According to the discovery of two elliptical impact craters, there might just have been another moon, but it ploughed into the Red Planet's surface a long time ago. The moonlet would have been approximately 1.5 km wide (0.9 [...]

One of the big news items last week was the prediction that an asteroid was on a collision course with Earth. Although it was a small space rock – estimates ranged from 1-5 meters (3-15 feet), scientists were excited because this was the first time an asteroid was discovered with an imminent known impact. [...]

Looking for a little excitement tonight? An asteroid between 1-5 meters (3-15 feet) was discovered just hours ago at an Arizona observatory, and might provide a spectacular light show as it comes through Earth's atmosphere. But don't be alarmed – scientists predict it will be harmless and burn up before it reaches [...]

Meteorites and asteroids from the inner solar system could be responsible for Earth's store of precious metals such as platinum and iridium, brought to our nascent planet during the period of Late Heavy Bombardment, about 4,000 million years ago. Dr. Gerhard Schmidt from the University of Mainz, Germany, has calculated that about 160 ...

Well, I've just been accepted into an elite club of people with astronomical objects named after them. And no, my Mom didn't name a star after me. The asteroid hunting team of David Healy and Jeff Medkeff have collectively discovered 487 asteroids, and designated 62 of them. You might already recognize some of asteroid names: [...]

ESA's Rosetta spacecraft successfully flew by the asteroid 2867 Steins, coming within 800 km (500 miles) and gathering images and data on the irregularly shaped rock in space. "Steins looks like a diamond in the sky," said Uwe Keller, Principal Investigator for the OSIRIS imaging system on board the spacecraft. Watch an movie ...

A frequent plot device in the old "Mission: Impossible" television show was the special masks the IMF team used so they could impersonate anyone. Viewers were often surprised to find out who ended up being an imposter. Likewise, astronomers and planetary scientists are considering that a fair amount of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) [...]