NASA’s Lucy spacecraft just pulled off its second asteroid flyby and imaged a frankly tasty-looking rock: a peanut-shaped asteroid named Donaldjohanson. The oblong asteroid is a fragment of a long-destroyed space rock that formed roughly 150 million years ago, and Lucy swooped within 600 miles (960 kilometers) of it on April 20, 2025, capturing some … Read more
NASA has shared the first closeup images of the Donaldjohanson asteroid, captured by its Lucy spacecraft on a recent flyby around 139 million miles (223 million km) from Earth. Our #LucyMission took a look at asteroid Donaldjohanson, its second asteroid encounter on its journey to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The first images reveal a unique fragment … Read more
A NASA spacecraft will make a close approach to an asteroid in the main belt on Sunday afternoon, in the second of several asteroid flybys planned for its 12-year mission to study remnants of the early solar system. The Lucy spacecraft will be 596 miles (960 km) from asteroid Donaldjohanson — named after the paleoanthropologist … Read more
Asteroid 2024 YR4 made headlines earlier this year when astronomers found it had a 1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032. Further observations showed that the chances of impact dropped to practically zero, so there’s no need to worry about an upcoming impact from this object in the next 10 years. But an asteroid passing … Read more
Scientists say that dinosaurs weren’t doomed when an asteroid hit Earth. Fossil unearthings before the asteroid collision, at the end of the Cretaceous epoch, show that dinosaurs were losing variety and numbers. At first, some scientists thought this alteration showed dinosaurs were headed toward extinction even before the fatal asteroid incident. Nevertheless, this concept has … Read more
It was a swing and a miss for the first private attempt at an asteroid mission, but the company is still chalking it up as a win. California startup AstroForge launched a spacecraft dubbed Odin on February 26, but the team lost communication with it shortly after its launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. … Read more
It seems that Earth isn’t likely to be struck by an incoming asteroid after all, as scientists have revised the impact likelihood of object 2024 YR4. The asteroid which has a length of around 130 to 300 feet was spotted at the end of last year, and was originally projected to have a 1% chance … Read more
Concerns regarding asteroid 2024 YR4 have diminished, as NASA has revised the probability of its impact on Earth in 2032 from 1 in 32 to 1 in 360. The asteroid, which has an estimated diameter of 55 meters, was initially considered the most hazardous object on NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) Sentry … Read more
There is a very small chance that an asteroid capable of taking out an entire city could strike Earth in less than eight years. But even if this asteroid is hurtling our way, humanity is now able to defend itself against such a threat, experts say. The odds that the recently discovered asteroid will hit … Read more
An asteroid that could level a city now has a 3.1-percent chance of striking Earth in 2032, according to NASA data released Tuesday — making it the most threatening space rock ever recorded by modern forecasting. Despite the rising odds, experts say there is no need for alarm. The global astronomical community is closely monitoring … Read more