An artistic rendering of early Earth during the Hadean eon shows a surface shaped by frequent impacts, localized melting, and regions with persistent liquid water. Neither entirely hellish nor tranquil, early Earth was a dynamic environment frequently transformed by impact bombardment. Credit: SwRI/Simone Marchi

The asteroid Ryugu is seen by the Hayabusa2 spacecraft from a distance of 6 kilometers. Credit: JAXA, University of Tokyo, Kochi University, Rikkyo University, Nagoya University, Chiba Institute of Technology, Meiji University, University of Aizu, AIST

The Rubin Observatory sits at 2,647 meters (8,684 feet) above sea level at Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes. Credit: RubinObs/NOIRLab/SLAC/NSF/DOE/AURA/P. Horálek (Institute of Physics in Opava), CC BY 4.0

Every nucleobase needed to build DNA and RNA — adenine, guanine, cytosine, thymine, and uracil — has been found in rock samples from the asteroid Ryugu, according to a study published in Nature Astronomy. Previous research in 2023 had found only uracil. — Read the rest

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NASA’s DART mission delivered humanity’s first measurable push to a celestial orbit.

NASA slammed a vending-machine-sized probe into an asteroid in 2022, changing its orbit. That was the plan. The entire binary system's path around the Sun also moved.

DART slammed into Dimorphos — a 160-meter-wide moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos — at over 22,000 km/h on September 26, 2022, shaving 33 minutes off its orbit. — Read the rest

The post NASA's DART probe shifted the…

The future of space colonies could rely on giant vats of metal extracting bacteria.

Last year, an asteroid called 2025 TF zipped past Antarctica at an altitude of 428 kilometers — no higher than where the ISS orbits. Nobody saw it coming. The Catalina Sky Survey picked it up only after it had already gone by, according to a data visualization by Pascal Bürkle at the Datawrapper blog. — Read the rest

The post An asteroid passed 428 km from Earth and no one saw it coming…

The Moon’s farside is heavily cratered and mostly lacks the dark volcanic basins of the familiar nearside. The South Pole–Aitken basin, the oldest and largest crater on the Moon, is the large dark region near the bottom of this composite image from the Clementine spacecraft in the 1990s. Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS