asteroid belt

Meteorites: Why study them? What can they teach us about finding life beyond Earth?

Universe Today has explored the importance of studying impact craters, planetary surfaces, exoplanets, astrobiology, solar physics, comets, planetary atmospheres, planetary…

6 months ago

NASA’s Psyche Mission is Back on. It’ll Launch Towards its Metal Asteroid Target Later This Year

NASA’s Psyche mission is back on track for launch and is now scheduled for a potential October 2023 launch date,…

2 years ago

Another Reason Red Dwarfs Might Be Bad for Life: No Asteroid Belts

In a recent study accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of researchers at the University of Nevada, Las…

2 years ago

The Building Blocks of Earth Could Have Come From Farther out in the Solar System

Earth formed over 4.5 billion years ago via accretion. Earth's building blocks were chunks of rock of varying sizes. From…

3 years ago

NASA’s Mission to Visit 8 Asteroids, Lucy, Launches on October 16th

An early morning launch is planned for the Lucy spacecraft, the first space mission to study Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. Tomorrow,…

3 years ago

This Object is Both an Asteroid and a Comet

In astronomy, comets and asteroids are defined very differently.  Comets have a “nucleus,” usually made of ice and dust, and…

3 years ago

Scientists Figure out how the Asteroid Belt Attacked the Dinosaurs

How do you track an asteroid that hit the Earth over 60 million years ago?  By using a combination of…

3 years ago

Two Bizarre red Asteroids Somehow Migrated From the Kuiper Belt all the way to the Main Asteroid Belt

If asked to pick what color asteroids in the asteroid belt would be, red is likely not one that would…

3 years ago

Astronomers Have Discovered a 2-km Asteroid Orbiting Closer to the Sun than Venus

Astronomers have painstakingly built models of the asteroid population, and those models predict that there will be ~1 km sized…

4 years ago

Wow! Asteroid/Dwarf Planet Ceres Once had an Ocean?

Two new studies produced by the Dawn mission team have shown that the protoplanet may have once had an ocean,…

7 years ago