Tryptophan, the essential amino acid behind the Thanksgiving myth that eating turkey can make you sleepy, has been found to exist on Bennu, a small asteroid that swings by our planet about every six ...

Lying between Mars and Jupiter is a massive ring of rock debris—the asteroid belt. Now thin, it’s fading away gradually. In a new study, planetary scientist Julio A. Fernández of Uruguay’s Universidad ...

If an asteroid is on a collision course with the moon, what should humanity do? Try to nudge the space rock out of the way before it strikes? Obliterate it with a nuclear explosion? Such a cosmic ...

After NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid, its orbit slowly but surely changed over the next month, and astronomers can’t explain why. In 2022, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) flew ...

The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, the ...

Because it's big enough to be deemed a "city killer," asteroid 2024 YR4 became a source of alarm due to the uncommonly high risk it had of colliding with Earth on Dec. 22, 2032. While Earth may no ...

NASA's Psyche mission is en route to a metal-rich asteroid, aiming to understand its composition, while US startups are actively developing technologies for asteroid mining. Asteroids hold ...

NASA is tracking an airplane-sized asteroid that's due to zip past Earth tomorrow at around 28,600 miles per hour, according to the space agency's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). The ...

Since its discovery in 1999, the near-Earth asteroid Bennu has captivated scientists as a time capsule from the early solar system — and also as a key to possibly understanding the origins of life. To ...

Although it won’t hit Earth, an asteroid once labeled a “city killer” is now back in the spotlight — this time, because it might hit the moon. KTLA spoke with Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer ...