Space, Asteroid | featured news

The chemical building blocks that make life possible on Earth may have aged to perfection in asteroids, according to a new study.

Mark your calendars for an impressive and upcoming flyby of an asteroid that’s one of the larger potentially perilous space rocks in the heavens – in terms of smacking the Earth in the future.

Jupiter and Mars aren't the only recent impact victims in our solar system. In two talks today at the Division for Planetary Sciences in Pasadena, California, astronomers report that a small asteroid located in the inner asteroid belt between those two planets took a major hit early last year.

A small asteroid passed within the moon's distance from the Earth on Wednesday morning, and another will do likewise later in the day, space watchers say.

NASA may appear to have its pick of thousands of known asteroids for a manned mission, but only two are good targets within the next 20 years. An asteroid mission requires a large-enough destination that astronauts could reach within a few months of launch from Earth, says Lindley Johnson, head of NASA's Near-Earth Object program in Washington. Other limits to such an ambitious undertaking include the viewing range of ground-based telescopes.

Astronomers have discovered a new Trojan asteroid in a space graveyard near Neptune

A European space probe headed toward its next target Sunday after sending back detailed images of an asteroid that scientists hope will increase understanding of how the solar system evolved.

Millions of miles from Earth, two astronauts hover weightlessly next to a giant space rock, selecting pebbles for scientific research. The spaceship ...

A team of scientists flew to the Australian Outback on Monday and recovered a Japanese space capsule that they hope contains asteroid samples providing clues into the evolution of the solar system.

"We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history," President Obama said in an April speech at NASA's Kennedy Space ...