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A 15 kilometer wide asteroid is headed toward the Earth, but NASA scientists spot it three years before impact. Movie lore not withstanding, what the hell are we supposed to do? Could we even organize the global community enough to stop this flaming ball that astronomers call a near-Earth object (NEO)? Let's find out. More »
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Many of you have probably heard about asteroid 2005 YU55, the massive rocky body that tomorrow night will collide with Earth in a ball of flames pass the planet safely, albeit closer than any asteroid in the last 35 years. More »
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NASA recently repurposed a satellite called WISE that had completed its mission with all instruments intact and quite a bit of fuel. Renaming the mission NEOWISE, the space agency gave the satellite a new job: map the entire volume of space in the vicinity of Earth's orbit around the sun, looking for every possible rock, boulder, or planetoid that could possibly smack into our Blue Marble. What they discovered caused them to build an entirely new model of the space debris in our immediate area (see image above).

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Designer Zachary Vabolis has catalogued 17 asteroids over 1000 meters that have skimmed by Earth or will in the near future. Who's coming by next? The 32,000-meter 1036 Ganymed, which whizzes by on October 13, 2011. More »
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The goal is to get humans to Mars by the mid-2030s, but what are the stepping stones that will get us there? Returning to the Moon gets a lot of publicity, but the better test might be a near-Earth asteroid. More »
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With all the hullabaloo about giant asteroids that could destroy us, we tend to forget the little guy. Luckily, NASA's Catalina Sky Survey has it covered. Last Monday, CSS astronomers caught sight of an incoming object zooming toward the Earth, and by the time of the asteroid's impact on Tuesday, NASA engineers had mapped out its trajectory almost exactly. This is "the first time we were able to discover and predict an impact before the event," announced Donald Yeomans, the manager of NASA/JPL's Near-Earth Object program — and I'm guessing he did it with no small amount of glee. More »
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With so much focus on corporate bailouts, climate change, and the threat of terrorism, one source of potential disaster has gone sorely neglected: asteroids. It's been ten years since Deep Impact and Armageddon taught us the dire consequences of an asteroid colliding with Earth, but experts say it's time to start taking seriously the threat of objects from space. More »
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For a while there in 2004, the newly-discovered asteroid 99942 Apophis looked like it had Earth's number. Then scientists crunched some numbers, and the odds of a terrestrial bullseye dropped to 1 in 45,000, where they stand today. Sort of. It turns out that there are a few things we still don't know about the orbit of Apophis, which could change its projected course by millions of miles, according to an article yesterday in New Scientist. Are we going to get slammed by the 270-meter long hunk of rock? We probably won't know for sure until we get a closer look at its close-ish Earth flyby in 2013. More »
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