After nearly 5 months in orbit around Vesta, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has returned some incredibly detailed data about the composition and structure of what was once surely considered an asteroid. But now scientists are starting to have second thoughts about what exactly Vesta is… is it really an asteroid? Or is it more like a…
Category: Asteroids
YU55’s Close-Up!
Want to see 2005 YU55? There it is… it’s dim, but it’s visible – especially to the 25-inch telescope at the Clay Center Observatory in Massachusetts! The image above is from a live feed the observatory was airing on Ustream, taken as the asteroid came to its closest distance to Earth at 6:28 pm EST….
Incoming! First New Image of 2005 YU55
This radar image of 1300-foot-wide (400 meter) asteroid 2005 YU55 was obtained on Nov. 7, 2011, at 11:45 a.m. PST (2:45 p.m. EST/1945 UTC), when the space rock was at 3.6 lunar distances, which is about 860,000 miles, or 1.38 million kilometers, from Earth. This asteroid will pass by Earth tomorrow at 6:28 pm EST,…
2005 YU55 is coming…
On Tuesday, November 8, at 6:28 p.m. EST, an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will soar past our planet, coming even closer than the Moon. This is the nearest an object this large has come since 1976… how will it affect our world? Find out here.
Say Hello To Our Little Friend
On July 27, 2011, scientists announced the discovery of a small asteroid that shares its orbit with Earth: 2010 TK7, a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid, precedes our planet within the same path we take around the Sun. It’s currently located about 50 million miles away in a position known as a Lagrange point (L4, to be exact) where…
Dawn: Orbit Established!
It’s confirmed: Dawn has entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta! The spacecraft, which launched in September 2007, has been steadily approaching the giant asteroid for several months. Its mission is to orbit Vesta for a year, studying its surface and composition, and then push off toward the even larger asteroid Ceres. Actually classified as a…
The Coming of Dawn
Can’t see the video below? Click here. After traveling almost four years and 1.7 billion miles, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is less than 100,000 miles from its first target: Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the solar system. Vesta resides in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and is believed to be the…
A Close Pass!
2011 MD, a newly-discovered asteroid estimated to be between 9 and 45 meters (30 – 150 feet) wide, will pass by Earth at a distance of about 17,700 km (11,000 miles) on Monday, June 27. That’s 23 times closer than the Moon! The asteroid was discovered on June 22, 2011 by MIT’s Lincoln Near Earth…
What’s Up for June?
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Jane Houston Jones from JPL tells us What’s Up For June in space exploration! (Hint: it’s solar system collisions!) The early solar system was a messy place and asteroids, moons and planets frequently collided and these collisions and impacts left scars we can see. Credit: NASA / JPL
Thirty Years of Asteroid Discovery
Can’t see the video below? Click here. This mesmerizing animation by Scott Manley illustrates the procession of asteroid discoveries from 1980 – 2010, illuminating each as they were spotted and categorized. The colors indicate how closely the asteroids come to the inner solar system… Earth-orbit-crossers are red, Earth-approachers are yellow and all the others are…
A First Look at an Asteroid
Ever wonder what an asteroid would look like from three-quarters of a million miles away? Well, here ya go. 🙂 This image, a processed version of the original, shows the true size of the 330-mile-wide asteroid Vesta as seen by the approaching Dawn spacecraft on May 3, 2011. The original image contained a lot of…
Small Worlds, Big Surprises
Far from being just a jagged hunk of rock tumbling through space, the asteroid Lutetia – visited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft this past July – has been found to be coated with a 2000-foot-thick layer of dust and rocks, visibly softening the edges of craters and ridges on its surface. This layer…
Lights in the Dark 