News Archive / Tagged: Near Earth Objects

• Newly discovered football field-sized asteroid to pass by Earth on Monday

  Tomasz NowakowskiSeptember 23rd, 2017

  A newly detected football field-sized asteroid, designated 2017 RW1, is slated to miss our planet on Monday, September 25, 2017. The space rock, estimated to be 34–110 meters in diameter, is expected to fly by Earth at a distance of approximately 10.9 lunar distances (LD), or 4.19 million kilometers.

• OSIRIS-REx begins search for Earth-Trojan asteroids

  Jim SharkeyFebruary 15th, 2017

  On Feb. 9, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft began searching for an elusive type of near-Earth object known as Earth-Trojan asteroids. The spacecraft, currently on a two-year outbound journey to the asteroid Bennu, will spend nearly two weeks looking for evidence of these small bodies.

• PANIC lander could revolutionize asteroid research

  Tomasz NowakowskiDecember 20th, 2016

  A U.S.-German team of researchers has proposed to develop a micro-scale, low-cost surface lander for the in situ characterization of an asteroid. The tiny spacecraft, called the Pico Autonomous Near-Earth Asteroid In Situ Characterizer (PANIC), could be a breakthrough for the scientific community, offering simple and cheap solutions for asteroid research.