Asteroids

Freethink's weekly countdown of the biggest developments in space, featuring NASA's first asteroid sample, a Curiosity milestone, and more.

NASA has just retrieved its first asteroid sample, bringing nearly 9 ounces of the asteroid Bennu to Earth.

After years of asteroid impact research, experts think the world’s largest known impact structure is buried deep in the earth in Australia.

NASA hopes to get a glimpse at Earth's core by sending a spacecraft to 16 Psyche, an metal-rich asteroid 280 million miles away.

HelioLinc3D, an algorithm designed to spot potentially hazardous asteroids in telescope images, just found its first threatening space rock.

Researchers note a "synchronicity" of geochemical signals suggesting that fragments of a comet struck Earth approximately 13,000 years ago.

Now that falling launch costs are making space more accessible, hundreds of groups are looking for ways to make money off-world.

NASA and ESA have updated their odds of 2023 DW, an asteroid the size of an Olympic swimming pool, hitting Earth in 2046.

NASA has added a tenth asteroid flyby to the record-breaking Lucy mission so that it can test a new asteroid-tracking system.

By analyzing just three dust particles, researchers learned that the rubble pile asteroid Itokawa is 4.2 billion years old and hard to kill.