The Asteroid Redirect Mission, which has a fairly self-explanatory name, is part of NASA's mission to develop technologies for redirecting and otherwise neutralizing possible asteroid threats. With the mission comes secondary benefits, as well: the early use of technologies needed to send astronauts to Mars and then bring them back.
One of the research areas that NASA is involved in is the Asteroid Redirect Mission. This happens to be one of the key elements of study that hope to put humans on Mars. Although they have their own resources to explore the options, NASA is throwing open their doors to new ideas and creative solutions from folks involved in studies that can help them in their mission.
Last year, NASA introduced its partnership with Planetary Resources and upcoming Grand Asteroid Challenge, which pits humanity against the race to protect our planet from potentially devastating asteroids. On Monday, the space agency will kick off its first contest under the challenge: Asteroid Data Hunter.
If you are the sort that likes to worry about an asteroid hitting the Earth, you have little to fear today. NASA says that the flyby of asteroid 2014 DX110 is a "non-event" but the 90-foot diameter asteroid is going to pass between the orbits of the Earth and the moon this afternoon.
NASA's efforts on the Red Planet have resulted in thousands of images, some more mystifying than others, but few quite as powerful as a high-resolution photograph taken of a fresh asteroid impact. The photo features the resulting crater in the middle, and shows the huge rayed blast zone around it, revealing something akin to blackened sunbeams.
Mars has been a playground for NASA's various robots and missions, and it was back in March that the Curiosity rover found evidence of conditions for habitable life, something that has cropped up in various degrees since then. According to some US researchers, it is possible that rocks containing life could have been blasted, so to speak, to the Red Planet from the Chicxulub impact that took out the dinosaurs and many other strikes.
Scientist have made an amazing discovery in the Chesapeake Bay. A team of researchers were drilling into the center of an ancient asteroid impact crater in the bay. The carter is known as the Chesapeake Bay impact crater and was formed when an asteroid hit the Earth about 35 million years ago.
This past summer, NASA announced the beginning of its Grand Asteroid Challenge with something it calls Grand Challenges, a push by the Obama Administration to further innovations and increase new discoveries. Today the agency has announced its first partnership under this challenge, with NASA penning an agreement with Planetary Resources in Washington state to crowdsource the detection of asteroids.
Japanese space agency JAXA has successfully test fired its "space cannon" that is designed to launch a projectile into asteroid. The space cannon will eventually be mounted inside the Japanese Hayabusa-2 space probe. That space probe is expected to launch in 2014.
What some classifies as one of the most dangerous asteroids ever discovered zipped past the Earth last month. The asteroid is called 2013 TV135 and the asteroid will again pass close by the Earth in about 20 years. The asteroid made headlines again when reports surfaced that there was a chance the Earth and the asteroid could collide on the next orbit.
Although the space agency has suffered from insufficient funding for its task, NASA has pressed ahead in the long process of finding near-Earth objects, which are more commonly referred to as NEOs. By doing so, the agency is able to anticipate whether a particular space rock is a future threat to our planet, something that is part of its larger goal of developing technology to deflect asteroids into a safer trajectory. A lot of progress has been made, and the first milestone has been reached - the identification of the 10,000th NEO.
NASA has published a series of images taken of the asteroid 1998 QE2, which were snapped yesterday via the Deep Space Network Antenna in California. Although the asteroid was located 3.75 million miles away, its relative distance was quite close, and it brought with it a moon, which is smaller in diameter and visible in the images as the white spot. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory took the opportunity to observe the asteroid, led by Marina Brozovic.