Asteroid to miss Earth in 2036, but could be on collision course in 2068

October 7th, 2009 NASA downgrades threat of large asteroidLOS ANGELES — Earth can breathe a sigh of relief. NASA on Wednesday downgraded the odds of an 885-foot asteroid striking the planet in 2036.

September 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a very rare finding, scientists have discovered an unusual kind of meteorite in the Western Australian desert and have uncovered that it came from the innermost main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Meteorites are the only surviving physical record of the formation of our Solar System.

August 30th, 2009 LONDON - British space scientists have designed a special spacecraft that can save the earth from a catastrophic asteroid collision. The 10 tonne spacecraft named "gravity tractor" would be deployed to intercept an asteroid en route to the earth and has the ability to fly 160 ft alongside it.

August 12th, 2009 LONDON - A committee appointed by the White House to review NASA's aims has put forward the idea to send astronauts on progressively longer space trips to asteroids, in order to prepare them for a landing on Mars. According to a report in New Scientist, committee member Edward Crawley of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that the first mission would fly by the moon.

August 12th, 2009 Report: NASA can't keep up with killer asteroidsWASHINGTON — NASA is charged with spotting most of the asteroids that pose a threat to Earth but doesn't have the money to complete the job, a federal report says. That's because even though Congress assigned the space agency that mission four years ago, it never gave NASA the money to build the necessary telescopes, according to the report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

July 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is introducing a new Web site that will provide a centralized resource for information on near-Earth objects - those asteroids and comets that can approach Earth. The "Asteroid Watch" site also contains links for the interested public to sign up for NASA's new asteroid widget and Twitter account.

July 21st, 2009 LONDON - A new research says that asteroid-sized balls of magma hurtled through our infant solar system, and spray from their many collisions provided much of the raw material that formed Earth and its rocky siblings. According to a report in New Scientist, this is according to a new take on an old theory that challenges the notion that the solar system started out as a placid sea of dust motes which simply clumped together to form planets.

July 15th, 2009 Space invaders: Asteroid belt has rocks from afarWASHINGTON — A new astronomy theory says the solar system's main asteroid belt is littered with icy invaders from far away. The so-called invaders are asteroids that seem more like primitive frozen comets than the baked rocks that make up the overwhelming majority of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter.

June 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Japanese scientists have announced that a 1,124-pound (510-kilogram) space probe will "collide" with our home planet in June 2010 to simulate an approaching asteroid. According to a report in National Geographic News, the Hayabusa spacecraft is currently on its way back to Earth after a successful mission that landed on and hopefully collected samples from the asteroid Itokawa.

June 11th, 2009 London, June 11 (ANI: A new analysis of craters of the Moon has suggested that the shattered remnants of a dwarf planet may have bombarded the inner planets in the early solar system. According to a report in New Scientist, several large impact scars on the moon appear to be around 3.9 billion years old, suggesting that the Earth and other objects of the inner solar system were heavily pounded at that time.

April 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - David French may be the guy who saves the world from an asteroid when it comes hurtling down from space. French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU), has thought up a way to divert asteroids and other threatening objects from hitting the earth.

April 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A scientist in the US has found an effective way to deflect an Earth-threatening asteroid, by attaching a long tether and ballast to the incoming object. The theory has been put forward by David French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina (NC) State University, US.

April 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Planetary scientists are all set to turn "noise" from the data obtained by NASA/ESA LISA satellites' mission into useful information about the mass of near-Earth asteroids. LISA is on a mission to detect gravitational waves - a warping of the space/time continuum that scientists hope to see directly for the first time.

March 27th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists have identified a tiny asteroid before it hit the earth, helping computers pinpoint its origins and predict the arrival of its shattered parts. The four-metre-diameter asteroid, called 2008 TC3, was initially sighted by the automated Catalina Sky Survey telescope at Mount Lemmon, Arizona, on Oct 6 last year.

March 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An asteroid as big as a 10-storeyed building flew past Earth Tuesday, the US space website has said. The space rock was perhaps a bit larger than one thought to have created a colossal explosion in the air above Siberia in 1908 that flattened 500,000 acres (2,000 square km) of forest.