NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, will make a daring attempt to “TAG” asteroid Bennu on Oct. 20 – touch its surface and collect a sample for return to...

What's the best way get a sample of an asteroid? Play tag with it! That's the plan for OSIRIS-REx, a NASA spacecraft that will approach the asteroid Bennu in 2018. The collection will be done with an instrument on board called the...

In a remote area of northwest Greenland, an international team of scientists has made a stunning discovery, buried beneath a kilometer of ice. It’s a meteor impact crater, 300 meters deep and bigger than Paris or the...

In late August, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will navigate to asteroid Bennu’s surface for its first sample collection attempt. To do this, it will use an onboard image software known as Natural...

Late last year, astronomers noticed that an asteroid named Scheila had unexpectedly brightened and it was sporting short-lived plumes. Data from NASA's Swift satellite and Hubble Space Telescope show that these changes...

Desert Research And Technology Studies (D-R.A.T.S) kicks off an exciting new year of field testing. The crew is back in action, testing communication scenarios for near-Earth asteroids, and 2 new instruments from Goddard: ExPED and...

On Oct. 20, the OSIRIS-REx mission will perform the first attempt of its Touch-And-Go (TAG) sample collection event. Not only will the spacecraft navigate to the surface using innovative navigation...

Observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed the presence of persistent water vapor — but, mysteriously, only in one hemisphere.



Europa harbors a vast ocean underneath...

Japan's rovers that successfully landed on an asteroid have sent back their first images.

The OSIRIS-REx team has already pushed the boundaries of scientific exploration -- going from ground-based radar images from Arecibo in Puerto Rico all the way to orbiting a few hundred meters...

Like boot prints on the Moon, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft left its mark on asteroid Bennu. Now, new images — taken during the spacecraft's final fly-over on April 7, 2021 — reveal the...

Since arriving at asteroid Bennu in Dec. 2018, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission has achieved many feats – from setting a record-breaking orbit, to mapping the asteroid’s surface better than any planetary body. The...

NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample return mission launched in 2016 and now (August, 2018) is entering its approach phase. OSIRIS-REx will arrive at asteroid Bennu in December, 2018. OSIRIS-REx will help unveil the...

Meet Lucy as she prepares for the first ever journey to the Trojan asteroids, a population of primitive small bodies orbiting in tandem with Jupiter.



Video credit: NASA's Goddard Space Fli

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Lucy is the first mission to explore the Jupiter Trojans – two swarms of asteroids that share Jupiter’s orbit, leading and trailing the giant planet by sixty degrees. These primitive bodies are thought to be...

Observing occultations from Earth is one of the tools scientists have for gathering precise information about the size and shape of Lucy’s target destinations, known as “Trojan” asteroids.



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Between 100,000 and a million small-scale asteroids have a possibility of hitting Earth over the next century, and five in particular have a collision risk of one in 1,000.

OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program. Its goal is to explore near-Earth asteroid Bennu, a...

We are going forward to the Moon by 2024, but did you know that back in 2005, Dr. Jim Garvin and his team of scientists pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at our nearest celestial neighbor for a very important...

Rotating asteroids have a tough time sticking to their orbits. Their surfaces heat up during the day and cool down at night, giving off radiation that can act as a sort of mini-thruster. This force, called the Yarkovsky effect, can...

In an interplanetary faux pas, it appears some pieces of asteroid Vesta ended up on asteroid Bennu, according to observations from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The new result sheds light on the intricate...

Meet Lucy as she prepares for the first ever journey to the Trojan asteroids, a population of primitive small bodies orbiting in tandem with Jupiter.



Music is "Lazy Days" by Arch Bacon, via...

On Jan. 9, 2020, the Lucy Mission officially announced that it would be visiting not seven, but eight asteroids. As it turns out, Eurybates, one of the asteroids along Lucy’s path, has a small satellite....

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang—the farthest individual star...