An asteroid alert rarely starts with certainty. It begins with a faint point of light and a short run of observations, so early math can leave room for several futures. When NASA flags a near Earth ...

Asteroid 2024 YR4 will not hit Earth, but it has forced planetary defense experts to confront a different kind of worst case: a significant chance that a “city killer” rock could slam into the Moon ...

There is this saying that the more you know about something, the more likely you are to grow concerned about some aspect of it. The validity of this saying became painfully clear when reading this ...

At this point in history, astronomers and engineers who grew up watching "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon," two movies about the destructive power of asteroid impacts, are likely in relatively high ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...

"We don’t know where they are,” said NASA’s planetary defense officer Kelly Fast at the AAAS conference in Arizona this week.

Space agencies maintain that global cooperation and sustained investment are vital to planetary defence. While the DART ...

JWST imaged 2024 YR4 in late March, making it the smallest object the telescope had imaged to date. The data its instruments collected indicate that based on the amount of heat it gives off, 2024 YR4 ...