"For asteroids of the size scale relevant to planetary defense (i.e., ∼50-500 m), the mass can only be directly measured ...

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 ...

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) as a research area encompass the observational, theoretical, and modeling studies of asteroids and comets whose orbits bring them into proximity with Earth, typically with ...

Richard Binzel has been watching the skies for hazardous asteroids for more than 50 years. In 1995, he proposed the Near-Earth Object Hazard Index, later renamed the Torino scale, which rates ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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

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 ...