Tag: Asteroids

A stadium-sized asteroid tumbled harmlessly past Earth this month as a powerful NASA radar system watched. Asteroid 2008 OS7 passed by Earth on Feb. 2, 2024 at a safe distance of 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers), about 7.5 times farther than the Earth-moon distance. While there was no risk of the space rock harming our planet, scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the sophisticated Goldstone Solar System Radar (GSSR) to produce a series of images of the asteroid as it passed by us. The new observations helped…

The rocks making up the Geminid meteor shower that occurs towards the end of every year may have been born through a chaotic event 18,000 years ago, a new study suggests — potentially making the meteoroids about 10 times older than previously estimated. The Geminid shower is named after the constellation Gemini —  the position in the sky from which the meteors seem to appear. But the meteors actually originate from 3200 Phaethon, a bizarre blue asteroid that swings along a watermelon-shaped orbit to come within just 0.14 astronomical units…

A “potentially hazardous” football stadium-size asteroid will zip safely past Earth on Friday (Feb. 2), and, in doing so, will reach its closest point to our planet for more than 100 years. It will also be at least several centuries before the space rock ever gets this close to us again.  The massive asteroid, named 2008 OS7, is around 890 feet (271 meters) across and will pass by Earth at a distance of around 1.77 million miles (2.85 million kilometers), according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). For context, that…

After more than a decade of hunting for asteroids and comets, the days of NASA’s NEOWISE mission are officially numbered. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California (JPL) just announced that the NEOWISE mission will come to an end within just a few years. JPL mission planners expect that solar activity will drag the space telescope out of orbit, and to a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere, by 2025. “The mission has planned for this day a long time,” Joseph Masiero, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology…

A rare astronomical event will be perfectly positioned in the night sky on Monday (Dec. 11) for some parts of the world. On that evening, an asteroid will pass in front of the curious red star Betelgeuse, eclipsing it from our vantage point here on Earth and blocking it from view for up to 15 seconds in an event known as an occultation. The asteroid is known as 319 Leona, a main belt object that orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. Shaped roughly like an egg, 319 Leona measures…