Tag: Asteroids
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Diverse destinations considered for new interplanetary probe
NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft collected images for this montage of Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io in 2007. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Goddard Space Flight Center Science teams from across the United States have submitted 28 proposals for missions to explore the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, touch the asteroid-like…
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NASA opts to grab a boulder, not the whole asteroid
STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS “SPACE PLACE” & USED WITH PERMISSION Artist’s concept of the robotic spacecraft designed to retrieve a boulder from the surface of an asteroid. Credit: NASA After an extended review, NASA has opted to forgo capturing a small asteroid as an interim step on the road to sending astronauts to Mars. Instead, the…
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NASA and Planetary Resources release asteroid-hunting desktop app, cite 15% boost in positive IDs
Ready to hunt for some asteroids? NASA and Planetary Resources have announced a new desktop app that incorporates algorithms from a contest that challenged researchers to detect asteroids with greater accuracy. The Asteroid Data Hunter app runs on Windows and Mac, with a Linux version coming soon. Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company based in Redmond, Wash.,…
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Japan’s Hayabusa 2 asteroid mission checks out
Artist’s concept of the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft. Credit: JAXA/Akihiro Ikeshita Three months into an interplanetary cruise expected to last three-and-a-half years, Japan’s $300 million Hayabusa 2 mission is in good health as it begins an ion-powered pursuit of an asteroid to return a piece of it to Earth. The robotic spacecraft is already traveling more…
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Bonus fuel could change OSIRIS-REx flight plan
The OSIRIS-REx mission’s main hydrazine tank was integrated with the spacecraft’s structure at Lockheed Martin’s Denver facility in December 2014. Credit: NASA/Lockheed Martin A NASA spacecraft under construction for launch in 2016 to retrieve samples from asteroid Bennu could benefit from an extra load of fuel, allowing an extended stay at the asteroid or a…
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Asteroid and its moon revealed in radar imagery
Radar imagery of a mountain-size asteroid that approached Earth this week revealed the tiny world has its own moon. Scientists know many asteroids have their own natural satellites, and one of the reasons observers were anxious to glimpse asteroid 2004 BL86 as it passed near Earth was to see if the rock has a companion.…
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NASA, JAXA reach asteroid sample-sharing agreement
Artist’s concept of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft at asteroid Bennu. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Scientists from the United States and Japan plan to share asteroid specimens from the OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa 2 sample return missions under an agreement signed by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The missions will explore…
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Asteroid mining company Planetary Resources launching first spacecraft
An artist’s rendering of the Arkyd 100 space telescope in orbit. The launch of the Arkyd 3 engineering demonstrator (below) is the first big step in Planetary Resources’ plan to find and mine asteroids. Update: Rocket carrying Planetary Resources satellite explodes shortly after liftoff The team at Planetary Resources has years of experience sending spacecraft into orbit…
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Planetary Resources teams with Zooniverse to turn everyone into an asteroid hunter
Planetary Resources announced today that it has teamed up with Zooniverse to create Asteroid Zoo, a web app that allows people to search for asteroids by flipping through pictures collected by the Catalina Sky Survey. The app gives users a variety of tools to flip through a quartet of sky images collected from a telescope,…
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NASA and Planetary Resources offer cash bounty for asteroid detection software
Want to figure out how to save the Earth and make some cash at the same time? Thanks to a new partnership, that’s a possibility. NASA is teaming up with Bellevue-based Planetary Resources to offer $35,000 in prizes in a series of contests over the next six months to people who create software that can…