asteroid
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Another Lucy Bonus: Asteroid’s Surprise Moon Is Actually Two Rocks Stuck Together
The first look at the Dinkinesh asteroid revealed a surprise: The small space rock had its own moon. Now as the Lucy spacecraft downlinked more images of its first target, it showed not one but two tiny asteroids orbiting around Dinkinesh. NASA’s Lucy mission made a close flyby of the Dinkinesh asteroid on November 1,…
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Dust Doomed the Dinos, Scientists Say
We all know how the story goes: a large asteroid falls to Earth from space, slamming into the Yucatán Peninsula with 100 million megatons of force. The impact spawned tsunami waves best measured in miles and kicked up dust, soot, and sulphur that blotted out the Sun, causing the death of about 75% of Earth’s…
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NASA Is Struggling to Open Its Asteroid Sample Container
About a month ago, pristine samples from an asteroid landed on Earth while enclosed within a tight capsule. The sample canister was designed to keep the main chunk of the asteroid safe during its journey through space, but now teams at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) are struggling to open it to get at the…
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Returned Asteroid Samples Are an ‘Astrobiologist’s Dream,’ NASA Says
The OSIRIS-REx canister still contains the bulk of the asteroid sample inside, but pieces of the ancient space rock found on the outside have already shown evidence of organic matter embedded within tiny bits of debris. On Wednesday, NASA revealed the first look at samples returned from asteroid Bennu through its OSIRIS-REx mission. Scientists performed…