Space news stories

They both orbit the sun, but they’re very different.

JAXA project manager Yuichi Tsuda said they needed more time to prepare the landing as the latest data showed the asteroid surface was more rugged than expected.

A capsule carrying the two crew members of a Russian Soyuz rocket that malfunctioned on lift-off has landed safely in Kazakhstan.

During its free fall, the probe managed to capture 20 photographs of Ryugu, which were subsequently uploaded to the Hayabusa2 spacecraft for safekeeping.

Extinct comet classified as potentially hazardous because of its size and proximity to our planet.

The two Japanese robots have captured Ryugu in incredible detail. The images reveal a richly textured surface, with rocks of all sizes jutting out into the darkness of space.

The suspense is over: Two tiny hopping robots have successfully landed on an asteroid called Ryugu — and they’ve even sent back some wild postcards from their new home.

New results demonstrate that the Solar System’s largest asteroid, Ceres, is covered in volcanoes that have spewed ice throughout their history.

Uranus and Neptune were pushed farther from the sun, ran into what later became the Kuiper Belt, kicked some of its objects inward and in doing so created Trojan asteroids.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) will head to a two-asteroid system, consisting of the 800-meter-across (half-mile) Didymos and the 160-meter (124-foot) body orbiting it and crash into the smaller asteroid in an attempt to deflect it.

“Observations of today’s Kuiper Belt show that binaries like these were quite common in ancient times,” said planetary scientist William Bottke.

Maggie Aderin-Pocock talks about what it takes to get to an asteroid, what they can tell us about our own origins and why we need to be keeping an eye on them.

It’s been 12 years since everyone’s favourite dwarf planet Pluto officially lost planet status. And ever since there’s been no end to the debate over whether or not that was the right call.

Overnight and in the morning there was an abnormal situation – a pressure drop, an oxygen leak at the ISS, though crew are safe and unharmed by the breach to the exterior shell.

If all goes well, Hayabusa-2 will be the first spacecraft to successfully deploy landers to gather data from the surface of an asteroid.

Forget deflecting asteroids from hitting Earth—some engineers are drawing up a strategy to steer asteroids toward us, so our atmosphere can act as a giant catching mitt for resource-rich space rocks.