BiotechMashup

New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought. The findings also indicate NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids, meeting a goal agreed to with Congress in 1998.

NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of Earth's path around the sun.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) A wider range of asteroids were capable of creating the kind of amino acids used by life on Earth, according to new NASA research.

For decades, astronomers have analyzed the impact that asteroids could have on Earth. New research examines the opposite scenario: that Earth has considerable influence on asteroids -- and from a distance much larger than previously thought. The finding helps answer an elusive, decades-long question about where most meteorites come from before they fall to Earth and also opens the door to a new field study of asteroid seismology.

ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) programme is keeping watch over space hazards, including disruptive space weather, debris objects in Earth orbit and asteroids that pass close enough to cause concern.

(National Academy of Sciences) Congress has tasked NASA with detecting more near-Earth objects (NEOs) -- asteroids and comets that orbit the sun and could pose a potential hazard to Earth because they approach or cross the planet's orbit.

Astronomers have discovered bucket loads of buckyballs in space. They used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to find the little carbon spheres throughout our Milky Way galaxy -- in the space between stars and around three dying stars. What's more, Spitzer detected buckyballs around a fourth dying star in a nearby galaxy in staggering quantities -- the equivalent in mass to about 15 of our moons.

Researchers got their first up-close look at dust from the surface of a small, stony asteroid after the Hayabusa spacecraft scooped some up and brought it back to Earth. Analysis of these dust particles confirms a long-standing suspicion: that the most common meteorites found here on Earth, known as ordinary chondrites, are born from these stony, or S-type, asteroids.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is introducing a new Web site that will provide a centralized resource for information on near-Earth objects -- those asteroids and comets that can approach Earth. The "Asteroid Watch" site also contains links for the interested public to sign up for NASA's new asteroid widget and Twitter account.