When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The asteroids Bennu and Ryugu may both be fragments of the massive “parent” rock Polana (shown breaking apart here in a NASA illustration), new James Webb telescope data hints. | Credit: NASA Two of the solar system’s most famous asteroids, Bennu and Ryugu, …
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Two of the solar system‘s most famous asteroids, Bennu and Ryugu, may be fragments of a single massive “parent” asteroid that was smashed to pieces billions of years ago, new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) reveals. If true, the sibling space rocks — which have both recently been visited by spacecraft that successfully returned samples of them …
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Under a dark, star-streaked sky, scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico are deploying an unconventional tool for planetary defense: heliostats. “A heliostat is a very large — several meters on edge — motorized mirror that concentrates sunlight on a tower, like a giant magnifying glass,” Sandia scientist John Sandusky told Space.com. “As the sun moves across the …
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Recent NASA budget uncertainties could make one space agency endeavor up for grabs — defending Earth from incoming space rocks. That effort, undertaken by NASA for many years, could be given to the U.S. Space Force, which has a much bigger new budget. On the other hand, is a Space Force takeover of taking out potentially dangerous asteroids warranted, and …
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Giant space ‘boulders’ unleashed by NASA’s DART mission aren’t behaving as expected, revealing hidden risks of deflecting asteroids Live Science NASA’s asteroid-crash Earth defense tactic has a complication — DART ejected large boulders into space Space Deflecting Asteroids Isn’t Simple According to New Data from DART Universe Today “Something Unknown Is At Work Here”: Unexpected Results From NASA Mission To Deflect Asteroid IFLScience DART’s …
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