Asteroid Belt

Impact cratering happens on every solid body in the solar system. In fact, it is the dominant process affecting the surfaces on most extraterrestrial bodies today.

The United Arab Emirates unveiled plans Monday to send a spaceship to explore the solar system's main asteroid belt, the latest space project by the oil-rich nation after it launched the successful Hope spacecraft to Mars in 2020.

On May 9, NASA's Lucy spacecraft carried out a trajectory correction maneuver to set the spacecraft on course for its close encounter with the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh. The maneuver changed the velocity of the spacecraft by only about 7.7 mph (3.4 m/s).

Anyone can become an asteroid hunter thanks to a new program launched by astronomers at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. As part of the Catalina Sky Survey, the scientists created an online portal that opens their mission—the discovery and identification of space rocks that regularly visit Earth's neighborhood—to the general public.

After 15 years of attempts, researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have for the first time successfully detected water outgassing from a main-belt comet.

Astronomers used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star; that's 150 times the distance of Earth from the […]

Some of the asteroids NASA's Lucy mission will visit are still more than 330 million miles (530 million kilometers) away from the spacecraft, which is more than three times the average distance between Earth and the sun. But despite the great distance and the comparatively small sizes of these asteroids, Lucy caught views of four of them recently.

How did life come about? The answer to this question goes to the very heart of our existence on planet Earth.

In 2017, a mysterious comet dubbed 'Oumuamua fired the imaginations of scientists and the public alike. It was the first known visitor from outside our solar system, it had no bright coma or dust tail, like most comets, and a peculiar shape—something between a cigar and a pancake—and its small size more befitted an asteroid than a comet.

The cohesive force of asteroid particles influence microgravity and can be evaluated under several assumptions of particle size and their sensitivity to particle shape. Approximately hundreds of kilograms of material fall on to Earth's atmosphere daily from space, and filter down as tiny grains and fine dust. Many meteorites that reach Earth from space are pieces of asteroids.