Latest Asteroid Stories
Peter Suciu for RedOrbit.com On Tuesday, Planetary Resources announced its plan to mine Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs), paving the way for mankind's reach beyond the Earth. This would include mining for raw minerals, ranging from water - which would be required for any future human colonization – and two precious metals such as gold and platinum. “Many of the scarce metals and minerals on Earth are in near-infinite quantities in space,” said Dr. Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder and...
WASHINGTON, April 25, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Research by NASA and international scientists concludes giant asteroids, similar or larger than the one believed to have killed the dinosaurs, hit Earth billions of years ago with more frequency than previously thought. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) To cause the dinosaur extinction, the killer asteroid that impacted Earth 65 million years ago would have been almost 6 miles (10 kilometers) in...
Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com Researchers are reporting in the journal Nature that tiny "spherules" embedded in layers of rock have given them details about Earth's asteroid impacts. According to the team, the spherules were created when asteroids crashed into the Earth, vaporizing rock that expanded into space as a giant vapor plume. Small droplets of molten and vaporized rock in the plume then condensed and solidified, falling back to Earth as a thin layer. These particles were...
A bright ball of light traveling east to west was seen over the skies of central/northern California Sunday morning, April 22. The former space rock-turned-flaming-meteor entered Earth's atmosphere around 8 a.m. PDT. Reports of the fireball have come in from as far north as Sacramento, Calif. and as far east as North Las Vegas, Nev. Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., estimates the object was about the size of a...
Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com On Tuesday, the potential future of space enterprise was unveiled, as Planetary Resources announced its plans to mine Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs). Planetary Resources said it will be leading the way in this next step in mankind's plan to reach beyond Earth's atmosphere by mining asteroids for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals like gold and platinum. "The vision is to make the resources of space available to humanity both in space and...
A former NASA astronaut, the cofounders of Google, and a well-known Hollywood filmmaker are among those lending their support for a forthcoming startup that will attempt to mine asteroids for metals and other raw materials, according to AFP and other media reports published Saturday. As previously reported on RedOrbit, full details on the private space exploration company, which is being called Planetary Resources, Inc., will be revealed on Tuesday, April 24. However, PCMag's Damon...
NASA announced a new project on Wednesday that will enlist help from amateur astronomers to discover near-Earth objects (NEOs). The project, known as "Target Asteroids!", will support NASA's Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security - Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission. OSIRIS-REx aims to improve basic scientific understanding of NEOs and is scheduled to launch in 2016. NASA is asking amateur astronomers to help better characterize the population of NEOs,...
New evidence has come up that supports the idea that comets bombarding Earth billions of years ago carried and deposited the key ingredients for life. Scientists reported at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) that the research is part of a broader scientific effort to understand how amino acids and other ingredients for the first living things appeared on Earth billions of years ago. The team used laboratory "guns" and computer models to...
Protecting the Earth from an extinction-threatening asteroid has in the past been left up to Hollywood, which has deployed a barrage of special effects box office blockbusters that have kept deadly space rocks from smashing our planet into oblivion. But now, Scottish engineers have come up with a plausible way of dealing with asteroids that doesn’t include Hollywood special effects. Engineers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow are developing an innovative technique based on...
Latest Asteroid Reference Libraries
Johann Daniel Titius was born on January 2, 1729 in Konitz, Royal Prussia. He was a professor at Wittenberg. He is most famous for the Titius-Bode law, which helped him find the existence of a minor planet at 2.8 AU from the sun in 1766. The planet was later named Ceres. Titius died in Wittenberg on December 11, 1796. To his honor, the Titius asteroid in 1998 and the Titius lunar crater are named after him.
Lagrangian Point -- In Lagrangian mechanics, a Lagrangian point (or L-point) is one of five positions in space where the gravitational fields of two bodies of substantial but differing mass combine to form a point at which a third body of negligible mass would be stationary relative to the two bodies. Bodies at the L-point will not move relative to the parent bodies if they are not perturbed by other gravitational forces. They are sometimes also referred to as libration points. The...
Planet -- A planet is a body of considerable mass that orbits a star and that doesn't produce energy through nuclear fusion. Until recently, only nine were known (all of them in our own Solar system). As of the end of 2002 over 100 are known, with all of the new discoveries being extrasolar planets. Astronomers often call asteroids minor planets, and call the larger planetary bodies (those which are commonly called planets) major planets. Planets within the solar system can be...
Asteroid -- An asteroid, also called a minor planet or planetoid, is a member of a group of small, planet-like bodies that are part of our solar system. They are believed to be remnants of the interstellar clouds, nebula, that were not incorporated into planets during the formation of the solar system. The largest asteroid in the inner solar system is Ceres with a diameter of 1003 km. It also was the first to be discovered, by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1, 1801. Nowadays, over 9000...
The Solar System refers to the area in space that is dominated by our own Sun. It is comprised of the Sun and its associated astronomical objects that are held in its gravitational orbit. The Solar System was formed as a result of the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The mass of this system is located almost entirely in the Sun. Apart from the Sun, a high percentage of the remainder of the system’s mass is located in the eight solitary planets that...
![Trojan Colors Revealed (Artist\](/media/gallery/wide-field-infrared-survey-explorer-wise/thumbs/thumbs_697015main_pia16211_full.jpg "Trojan Colors Revealed (Artist\")
![Herschel\](/media/gallery/herschel/thumbs/thumbs_herschel_s_three-colour_view_of_asteroid_apophis.jpg "Herschel\")
