asteroid

13 Dec

NASA selects sample collection site on asteroid Bennu

Washington: After grappling with the rugged reality of asteroid Bennu's surface, the US space agency has finally selected a sample collection site on asteroid Bennu.The OSIRIS-Rex mission team selected the site designated "Nightingale" - located in a crater high in Bennu's northern hemisphere. Since its arrival in December 2018, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has mapped the entire asteroid in order to identify the safest and most accessible spots for the spacecraft to collect a sample.The team spent the past several months evaluating close-range data from four candidate sites in order to identify the best option for the sample collection, NASA said ina…

08 Apr

Big asteroid to fly ‘very close’ to Earth in mid-April: NASA

Washington: A large near-Earth asteroid discovered nearly three years ago will fly safely past Earth on April 19th, US space agency NASA has said.The space rock, known as 2014 JO25, is estimated to be 2,000 feet in size. It is expected to fly by Earth at a safe distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometres), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon, Xinhua news agency reported on Friday. "Although there is no possibility for the asteroid to collide with our planet, this will be a very close approach for an asteroid of this size," NASA…