Asteroid Belt

When the Vera C. Rubin Observatory comes online in 2025, it will be one of the most powerful tools available to astronomers, capturing huge portions of the sky every night with its 8.4-meter mirror and 3.2-gigapixel camera. Each image will be analyzed within 60 seconds, alerting astronomers to transient events like supernovae. An incredible 5 petabytes (5,000 terabytes) of new raw images will be recorded each year and made available for astronomers to study.

The satellite discovered during the first asteroid encounter of NASA's Lucy mission has an official name. On Nov. 27, 2023, the International Astronomical Union approved the name "Selam" or ሰላም, which means "peace" in the Ethiopian language Amharic, for Dinkinesh's moon.

DSOC, an experiment that could transform how spacecraft communicate, has achieved "first light," sending data via laser to and from far beyond the moon for the first time.

How did the molecular building blocks for life end up on Earth? One long-standing theory is that they could have been delivered by comets. Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown how comets could deposit similar building blocks to other planets in the galaxy.

A team of space scientists, astronomers and astrophysicists affiliated with multiple institutions across the U.S., working with a colleague from Italy, has determined that a celestial object spotted by citizen scientists back in 2016 is neither a comet nor an asteroid, but an object that lies on the boundary between both. In their paper published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes the multiple tests they did to determine the nature of the object and what they […]

The little asteroid visited by NASA's Lucy spacecraft this week had a big surprise for scientists.

On Nov. 1, NASA's Lucy spacecraft flew by not just its first asteroid, but its first two. The first images returned by Lucy reveal that the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh is actually a binary pair.

NASA's Lucy spacecraft on Wednesday encountered the first of 10 asteroids on its long journey to Jupiter.

After seven years in space and over 4 billion miles traveled, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission successfully collected and delivered the first U.S. sample from a near-Earth asteroid. Yet, after all this time and travel, the spacecraft will not retire.

Astronomers have discovered two known interstellar objects (ISO), 'Oumuamua and 21/Borisov. But there could be thousands of these objects passing through the solar system at any time. According to a new paper, the upcoming Vera Rubin Telescope will be a fantastic interstellar object hunter, and could possibly find up to 70 objects a year coming from other star systems.