Asteroid Belt

Meteorites—fragments of rock that have fallen to Earth from space in spectacularly fiery meteors—have been the subject of public fascination, awe, myths and even religious worship for thousands of years.

The ESA launched Gaia in 2013 with one overarching goal: to map more than one billion stars in the Milky Way. Its vast collection of data is frequently used in published research. Gaia is an ambitious mission, though it seldom makes headlines on its own.

Planet Earth is about to receive a special delivery—the biggest sample yet from an asteroid.

Roughly 5 billion years ago Earth was in the process of forming. Gas and dust gathered with the young sun's protoplanetary disk, likely nudged a bit by the resonant gravitational pull of Jupiter and other large worlds. One can imagine that as Earth formed it swept its orbit clear of debris, leaving a gap in the disk visible from light years away. While we know this tale is reasonably accurate, the idea that planets such as Earth always clear gaps in a protoplanetary disk likely isn't.

The small dot moving against the background of stars is the first view from NASA's Lucy spacecraft of the main belt asteroid Dinkinesh, the first of 10 asteroids that the spacecraft will visit on its 12-year voyage of discovery. Lucy captured these two images on Sept. 2 and 5, 2023. On the left, the image blinks between these first two images of Dinkinesh. On the right, the asteroid is circled to aid the eye.

Bound for a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, the Psyche mission is targeting Oct. 5 to launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A pair of astrophysicists, one with Kindai University, the other the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, both in Japan, have found possible evidence of an Earth-like planet residing in the Kuiper Belt. In their paper published in The Astronomical Journal, Patryk Sofia Lykawka and Takashi Ito describe properties of the Kuiper Belt that they believe are consistent with the existence of a planet not much bigger than Earth.

Just off a tree-covered side road past businesses selling boats and fishing gear sits a fenced-off building that's home to a $700 million satellite nearly ready for launch. Its mission: To study the metal-rich asteroid Psyche, which scientists suspect could mirror the inner core of Earth and other planets in the solar system.

French novelist Jules Verne delighted 19th-century readers with the tantalizing notion that a journey to the center of the Earth was actually plausible.

One of the U.K.'s most famous meteorites is helping scientists learn more about asteroids millions of kilometers away from Earth.