Asteroid Stories
At 12:56 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 23, NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security – Apophis Explorer) spacecraft will fly within about 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) of Earth. Passing about 100 times closer to Earth than the…
The IAU (International Astronomical Union), a global naming authority for celestial objects, has approved official names for features on Donaldjohanson, an asteroid NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited on April 20.
On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft, which was flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million…
The dwarf planet is cold now, but new research paints a picture of Ceres hosting a deep, long-lived energy source that may have maintained habitable conditions in the past. New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a…
Headed for a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, the Psyche spacecraft successfully calibrated its cameras by looking homeward. On schedule for its 2029 arrival at the asteroid Psyche, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft recently looked back toward home and captured images…
Scientists with NASA’s Lucy mission continue to analyze data collected during the spacecraft’s April 20 encounter with the main-belt asteroid Donaldjohanson. The images below were taken by the spacecraft’s L’LORRI imager a few minutes before its closest approach. This successful…
Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission have developed a solution to address the decrease in fuel pressure they detected recently in the spacecraft’s propulsion system
Analyzing gravity data collected by spacecraft orbiting other worlds reveals groundbreaking insights about planetary structures without having to land on the surface. Although the Moon and the asteroid Vesta are very different, two NASA studies use the same technique to…
Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission are working to determine what caused a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system.
NASA’s Lucy spacecraft took this image of the main belt asteroid Donaldjohanson during its flyby on April 20, 2025, showing the elongated contact binary (an object formed when two smaller bodies collide). This was Lucy’s second flyby in the spacecraft’s…