Asteroids may have boosted life on Earth 3.9 billion years ago

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 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - US space agency NASA does not have enough cash to track the large nearby asteroids that could pose a hazard to Earth, a study by the National Academy of Science found Wednesday. In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to track up to 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids that are 140 metres in diameter or larger by 2020.

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 31st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has found that comets contained vast oceans of liquid water in their interiors during the first million years of their formation, which may have fuelled life on Earth. According to Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at the Cardiff Centre for Astrobiology, the watery environment of early comets, together with the vast quantity of organics already discovered in comets, would have provided ideal conditions for primitive bacteria to grow and multiply.

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 13th, 2009 Washington, June 13 (ANI): A team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has come up with a mechanism that doubles the future lifespan of the biosphere of a planet, while also increasing the chance that advanced life will be found elsewhere in the universe. As the sun has matured over the past 4.5 billion years, it has become both brighter and hotter, increasing the amount of solar radiation received by Earth, along with surface temperatures.

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 12th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A recent US military policy decision explicitly states that observations by hush-hush government spacecraft of incoming bolides and fireballs are classified secret and are not to be released. For 15 years, scientists have benefited from data gleaned by US classified satellites of natural fireball events in Earth's atmosphere.

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 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Two identical NASA spacecraft are preparing to enter a point in the universe that may eventually answer the question of how our moon originated. The spacecraft duet, called Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or Stereo, are nearing a zone known as the Lagrangian points.

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 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA scientists analysing meteorite dust have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level. 'We found more support for the idea that biological molecules, like amino acids, created in space and brought to earth by meteorite impacts help explain why life is left-handed,' said Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt.

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.