Comets/Asteroids

Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona Preliminary results indicate that NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft successfully executed a 0.4-mile (620-m) flyover of site Nightingale yesterday as part of the mission's Reconnaissance B…

Enceladus' subsurface ocean composition hints at habitable conditionsCredit: NASA/JPL-Caltech SAN ANTONIO -- Jan. 22, 2020 -- A Southwest Research Institute team developed a new geochemical model that reveals that carbon dioxide…

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM More than 30 years ago, the European comet mission Giotto flew past Halley's comet. The Bernese ion mass spectrometer IMS, led by Prof. em. Hans Balsiger, was on board. A key finding from the measurements…

Credit: NAOJ Astronomers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have analyzed the paths of two objects heading out of the Solar System forever and determined that they also most likely originated from outside of…

Credit: NAOJ/Kasuga et al. At around 1 a.m. local standard time on April 29, 2017, a fireball flew over Kyoto, Japan. Compared to other fireballs spotted from Earth, it was relatively bright and slow. Now, scientists have…

Thanks to some astrophysical sleuthing, researchers have pinpointed an early galactic merger that helped shape the Milky Way. The merger -- a collision, actually -- happened 11.5 billion years ago. That's when a small galaxy called…

The ancient stardust reveals a 'baby boom' in star formationCredit: Image courtesy NASA, W. Sparks (STScI) and R. Sahai (JPL). Inset: SiC grain with ~8 micrometers in its longest dimension. Inset image courtesy of Janaína N. Ávila. Stars…

Scientists, including those from the University of Colorado Boulder, have finally scaled the solar system's equivalent of the Rocky Mountain range. In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers from the United States and…

Credit: Mingming Li/ASU Deep below the Earth's surface lies a thick rocky layer called the mantle, which makes up the majority of our planet's volume. While Earth's mantle is too deep for humans to observe directly, certain…

NASA spacecraft will explore a record eight objectsCredit: NASA and Southwest Research Institute SAN ANTONIO -- Jan. 9, 2020 -- Less than two years before launch, scientists associated with NASA's Lucy mission, led by Southwest…