NASA lacks money to track killer asteroids: study

September 3rd, 2009 SYDNEY - NASA is preparing to launch an infrared telescope that will hunt down dark asteroids that have slipped beneath our radar. According to a report by ABC Science, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft recently arrived at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California ahead of its launch later this year.

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 18th, 2009 LONDON - New computer simulations have suggested that dense swarms of asteroids collapsed under their own gravity to make the building blocks of the planets in our solar system. The planets are thought to have formed from a disc of dust and gas around the infant sun.

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 28th, 2009 LONDON - A new study of ancient rocks in Greenland has suggested that icy comets - not rocky asteroids - launched a dramatic assault on the Earth and moon around 3.85 billion years ago, thus causing the lunar surface to become scarred. "We can see craters on the moon's surface with the naked eye, but nobody actually knew what caused them - was it rocks, was it iron, was it ice?" Uffe Grae Jorgensen, an astronomer at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, told New Scientist.

July 17th, 2009 Hardware problem blamed on NASA satellite crashLOS ANGELES — A piece of rocket hardware failed to separate during the launch of a NASA climate satellite earlier this year, causing it crash back to Earth, according to an accident summary released Friday. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory splashed into the ocean near Antarctica on Feb.

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 3rd, 2009 Swiss astronomer claims discovery of 2 asteroidsFALERA, Switzerland — A Swiss amateur astronomer claimed Wednesday that he has discovered two new asteroids among the hundreds of thousands between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The asteroids identified by Jose De Queiroz have a diameter of between 1 kilometer and 2 kilometers, said a statement Mirasteilas observatory, which he runs.

May 21st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has indicated that the bombardment of Earth by asteroids 3.9 billion years ago may have enhanced early life rather then wipe it out. The study, by University of Colorado at Boulder researchers, determined that the bombardment of Earth nearly 4 billion years ago by asteroids as large as the US state of Kansas would not have had the firepower to extinguish potential early life on the planet and may even have given it a boost.

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 15th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA is inviting the public to vote online for the most important contribution the space agency has made to exploring Earth and improving the way we live on our home planet. NASA is conducting the survey as part of its celebration of Earth Day, April 22.

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.