With all the large asteroids hitting the news lately , it would have been easy for a small one to sneak under the radar. In fact, one very nearly did. On April 27, astronomers discovered a new asteroid, a little pixie of a space rock between 4 and 8 metres (13 to 26 feet) across.
It was already close to Earth at this point, and the probability of a collision was calculated at around 10 percent. At its size, it would have burnt up on atmospheric entry, so it posed no threat to humans anyway.
Were you following this:
Scientists identify tiny satellite around an asteroid NASA's Lucy spacecraft will visit | Space
NASA's Lucy asteroid mission already faced a busy itinerary with seven different space-rock targets. Now, the team has discovered that one of those asteroids has a tiny companion.
The realization came thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope , which the team first recruited in 2018 to study a space rock called Eurybates. Like several of the other Lucy mission targets, Eurybates belongs to a group of asteroids known as Trojans, which occupy about the same orbit around the sun as Jupiter but cluster ahead of or behind the gas giant.
Bad Astronomy | Chelyabinsk's smaller sibling asteroid fell over Arizona in 2016
On 2 June, 2016, at 10:56:26 UTC (03:56 local time), a very bright fireball fell over Arizona . It was seen by hundreds of witnesses and caught on multiple cameras, including some designed to look for bright meteors in the sky. In many respects it was a typical meteor, if extremely luminous due to its size (something less than a meter wide).
Except for one thing: It's likely this rock was the older brother of the one that fell over Chelyabinsk, Russia in 2013, the largest impact the Earth has seen in over a century. And that makes it very interesting indeed.
Bad Astronomy | On May 4th, a tiny asteroid missed Earth… but just barely
I guess the Force was with us: In the early morning hours of the 4th of May , a small asteroid 3-6 meters * across passed by the Earth, missing our world by a mere 7,000 kilometers — only about the radius of the Earth itself! It passed so close to us its orbit was significantly changed by Earth's gravity, too.
Before you panic, at this diameter (about the size of a car) it wouldn't have done any real damage even if it had hit us. But it would've put on a helluva show, creating an intensely luminous fireball easily brighter than the full Moon as it burned up and broke apart in our atmosphere, probably a few dozen kilometers above the Earth's surface. It's also likely small pieces would've made it to the ground as meteorites, too. But it did indeed miss us and is now on its way out.
And here's another article:
Hayabusa-2 Reveals Surface of Near-Earth Asteroid Ryugu in Stunning Detail | Space Exploration |
JAXA's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft recently traveled to the near-Earth asteroid (162173) Ryugu to collect samples and return them to Earth for lab analysis. Close-up images and video taken during the sampling process allowed an international team of researchers to investigate the asteroid's surface colors and morphology.
This image of the asteroid Ryugu was captured by the Optical Navigation Camera – Telescopic (ONC-T) on JAXA's Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on June 26, 2018, from a distance of 13.7 miles (22 km). Image credit: JAXA / University of Tokyo / Kochi University / Rikkyo University / Nagoya University / Chiba Institute of Technology / Meiji University / Aizu University / AIST.
"4.5 Billion Years Ago" --Atomic Imaging of Asteroid Reveals Oldest Fluids in the Solar
Home » Solar System » “4.5 Billion Years Ago” –Atomic Imaging of Asteroid Reveals Oldest Fluids in the Solar System
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In January, 2000, an asteroid, harboring some of the oldest fluids in the solar system, burst into Earth’s atmosphere, landing on the frozen surface of Tagish Lake in British Columbia, Canada. The now-iconic Tagish Lake meteorite appears to have originated in the middle of the asteroid belt as part of a meteoroid that, in its pre-atmospheric state, had a mass of about 200,000 kilograms, belonging to a rare class known as carbonaceous chondrites.
NASA might accidentally create the first man-made meteor shower – BGR
NASA’s upcoming test of an asteroid redirection system may accidentally trigger the first-ever manmade meteor shower. That’s according to a study published in The Planetary Science Journal that assessed the potential outcomes of the space agency’s upcoming Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission.
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The aim of the mission is to test the feasibility that a spacecraft could save Earth from an asteroid impact by slamming into it before it reaches our planet. The mission will send a fast-moving spacecraft to the binary asteroid Didymos, targeting the smaller of the two space rocks while scientists back on Earth observe the results of the impact.
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