Asteroids Archives

July 18, 2024July 18, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Swarming Satellites Could Autonomous Characterize an Asteroid

An asteroid’s size, shape, and rotational speed are clues to its internal properties and potential resources for mining operations. However, of the more than 20,000 near-Earth asteroids currently known, only a tiny fraction have been sufficiently characterized to estimate those three properties accurately. That is essentially a resource constraint – there aren’t enough dedicated telescopes on Earth to keep track of all the asteroids for long enough to characterize them, and deep space resources, such as the Deep Space Network required for communications outside Earth’s orbit, are already overutilized by other missions. Enter the Autonomous Nanosatellite Swarming (ANS) mission concept, developed by Dr. Simone D’Amico and his colleagues at Stanford’s Space Rendezvous Laboratory.

July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 by Andy Tomaswick

Swarms of Orbiting Sensors Could Map An Asteroid’s Surface

It seems like every month, a new story appears announcing the discovery of thousands of new asteroids. Tracking these small body objects from ground and even space-based telescopes helps follow their overall trajectory. But understanding what they’re made of is much more difficult using such “remote sensing” techniques. To do so, plenty of projects get more up close and personal with the asteroid itself, including one from Dr. Sigrid Elschot and her colleagues from Stanford, which was supported by NASA’s Institute for Advanced Concepts back in 2018. It uses an advanced suite of plasma sensors to detect an asteroid’s surface composition by utilizing a unique phenomenon – meteoroid impacts.

May 4, 2024May 4, 2024 by Matt Williams

Dinkinesh's Moonlet is Only 2-3 Million Years Old

A pair of stereoscopic images of the asteroid Dinkinesh and Selam created with data collected by the L’LORRI camera on NASA's Lucy spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab

Last November, NASA’s Lucy mission conducted a flyby of the asteroid Dinkinish, one of the Main Belt asteroids it will investigate as it makes its way to Jupiter. In the process, the spacecraft spotted a small moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid, now named Selam (aka. “Lucy’s baby”). The moonlet’s name, an Ethiopian name that means “peace,” pays homage to the ancient human remains dubbed “Lucy” (or Dinkinish) that were unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974. Using novel statistical calculations based on how the two bodies orbit each other, a Cornell-led research team estimates that the moonlet is only 2-3 million years old.

April 23, 2024April 23, 2024 by Matt Williams

Hubble Has Accidentally Discovered Over a Thousand Asteroids

Illustration of Asteroid (Artist’s Impression). Credit: N. Bartmann (ESA/Webb), ESO/M. Kornmesser and S. Brunier, N. Risinger

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is like a gift that keeps on giving. Not only is it still making astronomical discoveries after more than thirty years in operation. It is also making discoveries by accident! Thanks to an international team of citizen scientists, with the help of astronomers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and some machine learning algorithms, a new sample of over one thousand asteroids has been identified in Hubble‘s archival data. The methods used represent a new approach for finding objects in decades-old data that could be applied to other datasets as well.

April 19, 2024April 19, 2024 by Evan Gough

The Giant Planets Migrated Between 60-100 Million Years After the Solar System Formed

The migration of the giant planets had a hand in shaping our Solar System, including Earth. New research shows the migration happened much earlier than thought. Image Credit: NASA

Untangling what happened in our Solar System tens or hundreds of millions of years ago is challenging. Millions of objects of wildly different masses interacted for billions of years, seeking natural stability. But its history—including the migration of the giant planets—explains what we see today in our Solar System and maybe in other, distant solar systems.

New research shows that giant planet migration began shortly after the Solar System formed.

April 9, 2024April 9, 2024 by Evan Gough

What Happens to Solar Systems When Stars Become White Dwarfs?

In this artist's illustration, lumps of debris from a disrupted planetesimal are irregularly spaced on a long and eccentric orbit around a white dwarf. Credit: Dr Mark Garlick/The University of Warwick

In a couple billion years, our Sun will be unrecognizable. It will swell up and become a red giant, then shrink again and become a white dwarf. The inner planets aren’t expected to survive all the mayhem these transitions unleash, but what will happen to them? What will happen to the outer planets?

March 13, 2024March 13, 2024 by Brian Koberlein

A 790,000 Year-Old Asteroid Impact Could Explain Seafloor Spherules

A 0.4-millimeter diameter iron-rich spherule. Credit: Avi Loeb/The Galileo Project

Our solar system does not exist in isolation. It formed within a stellar nursery along with hundreds of sibling stars, and even today has the occasional interaction with interstellar objects such as Oumuamua and Borisov. So it’s reasonable to presume that some interstellar material has reached Earth. Recently Avi Loeb and his team earned quite a bit of attention with a study arguing that it had found some of this interstellar stuff on the ocean seabed. But a new study finds that the material has a much more local origin.

February 13, 2024February 13, 2024 by Mark Thompson

Water Found on the Surface of an Asteroid

Courtesy of NASA/Carla Thomas/SwRI Using data from NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), Southwest Research Institute scientists have discovered, for the first time, water molecules on the surface of an asteroid. Scientists looked at four silicate-rich asteroids using the FORCAST instrument to isolate the mid-infrared spectral signatures indicative of molecular water on two of them.

Our Solar System is a collection of objects from planets and moons to comets and asteroids. It’s thought there are upwards of 1 million asteroids orbiting the Sun and it was thought that any water present on them should have evaporate long ago. A recent study using data from the SOFIA infrared telescope discovered water on the asteroids Iris and Massalia.

January 30, 2024January 30, 2024 by Evan Gough

Webb Directly Images Two Planets Orbiting White Dwarfs

Artist's rendition of a white dwarf from the surface of an orbiting exoplanet. Astronomers have found two giant planet candidates orbiting two white dwarfs. More proof that giant planets can surve their stars' red giant phases. Image Credit: Madden/Cornell University

In several billion years, our Sun will become a white dwarf. What will happen to Jupiter and Saturn when the Sun transitions to become a stellar remnant? Life could go on, though the giant planets will likely drift further away from the Sun.

November 9, 2023November 9, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

Some of the Moon's Craters are From Interstellar Impacts. Can We Tell Which?

Far Side of Moon Imaged by MoonKAM. This image of the lunar surface was taken by the MoonKAM system onboard NASA’s Ebb spacecraft on March 15, 2012. Credit: NASA/Caltech-JPL/MIT/SRS

By discovering two interstellar objects (ISOs), we know that asteroids and comets from other star systems pass through the Solar System from time to time. By inference, some of these must have crashed into the Moon, creating impact craters. If we could study the impact sites, we might be able to learn about the star systems that they came from.

A new paper suggests there could be a way to determine which lunar craters came from interstellar object impacts. The authors say that young, small craters with high-melt volume near the Moon’s equator are likely the best candidates for ISO-generated craters on the lunar surface.