discovery program
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How Scientists Are Preparing for Apophis’s Unnervingly Close Brush With Earth
In about five years’ time, a potentially hazardous asteroid will swing by Earth at an eerily close distance of less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). During this rare encounter, Apophis will be ten times closer to Earth than the Moon and scientists want to take full advantage of its visit. Apophis is a on trajectory…
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Trojan Asteroids Loom Closer as NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Fires Up Engine for First Time
The asteroid-sleuthing probe is transitioning from its orbit around the Sun to one beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
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Seeing Double: Lucy’s First Target Asteroid Has a Tiny Moon
As NASA’s Lucy spacecraft zoomed past its first asteroid on Wednesday, its mission scientists made a surprising discovery of a bonus space rock. The first images sent over by the Lucy mission of its brief rendezvous with the main asteroid belt revealed a binary pair, with a tiny satellite closely orbiting Dinkinesh, NASA announced on…
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What to Know About NASA’s Unprecedented Psyche Mission to a Metallic Asteroid
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…