A menacing asteroid, some six miles wide, triggered Earth's last mass extinction. Now, scientists have found where it originated. It was "a projectile originating at the outskirts of the solar system ...
The asteroid that killed most dinosaurs 66 million years ago left behind traces of its own origin. Researchers think they know where the Chicxulub impactor came from based on levels of ruthenium. The ...
The asteroid Ryugu may look like a solid piece of rock, but it’s more accurate to liken it to an orbiting pile of rubble. Given the relative fragility of this collection of loosely bound boulders, ...
The pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu returned by the Hayabusa2 mission on December 6, 2020, have been vital to improving the understanding of primitive asteroids and the formation of the solar ...
In December 2020, after a year’s journey through space, a small capsule from the Japanese Space Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission fell to Earth. Landing in the Australian Outback, it contained just 5.4 grams ...
In 2018, the Japanese space agency’s Hayabusa2 probe visited the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu, which occasionally traverses our world’s orbit (but has yet to come dangerously close). It extracted a tiny ...
The asteroid responsible for our last mass extinction 66 million years ago — wiping out the dinosaurs — originated from the far reaches of our solar system, unlike most asteroids that have struck ...
This time last year, scientists got their hands on some very rare space rocks — specifically, 5.4 grams of material from the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu, which was returned to Earth via the ...
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