Scientists design “gravity tractor” to save earth from asteroids

October 1st, 2009 PARIS - Reports indicate that the European Space Agency's (ESA's) GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) has started sending data that will lead to the development of the best gravity map ever, providing a better understanding of Earth's gravity. The GOCE satellite was launched on March 17 from northern Russia.

September 23rd, 2009 LONDON - A European satellite is all set to begin a quest to make the most detailed global map of the Earth's gravity field. According to a report by BBC News, known as the Goce satellite, the arrow-shaped spacecraft can sense tiny variations in the planet's tug as it sweeps around the world at the very low altitude of just 255km.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 - 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.

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 Sydney, June 11 (ANI: In a grim scenario put forward by scientists, the gravity of Jupiter could one day pull Mercury off course, triggering a chain reaction of collisions in the Solar System. But despite the threat, there's only a 1 percent chance of this happening in the next 5 billion years, said French researchers.

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.

March 27th, 2009 LONDON - Scientists have used a virtual model to investigate options to save the Earth from an asteroid impact. According to a report in New Scientist, the model was developed by a team led by David Dearborn of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which modelled the impact of a nuclear explosion on an asteroid's trajectory.