asteroids

Dawn spacecraft reveals complexities of ancient asteroidal world
05/10/2012 - 15:23

New findings from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft lay the groundwork for the first geological overview of asteroid (4)Vesta and confirm the existence of not one but two giant impact basins in its southern hemisphere. The findings, published today in a set of Science papers, will help scientists better understand the early solar system and processes that occurred as it formed and evolved.

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NASA's Chandra Finds Milky Way's Black Hole May be Grazing on Asteroids
02/08/2012 - 14:33

A new study provides a possible explanation for the mysterious flares. The suggestion is that there is a cloud around Sgr A containing hundreds of trillions of asteroids and comets, which have been stripped from their parent stars. The panel on the left is an image containing nearly a million seconds of Chandra observing of the region around the black hole, with red representing low-energy X-rays, green as medium-energy X-rays, and blue being the highest.

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Orbit of captured electron matches orbit of Jupiter's captured asteroids
01/24/2012 - 15:44

Rice University physicists have gone to extremes to prove that Isaac Newton's classical laws of motion can apply in the atomic world: They've built an accurate model of part of the solar system inside a single atom of potassium.

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NASA Space Telescope Finds Fewer Asteroids Near Earth
09/30/2011 - 06:07

New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought. The findings also indicate NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids, meeting a goal agreed to with Congress in 1998.

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