Nasa, Earth | featured news

Upon further review, a big scary-sounding asteroid is no longer even a remote threat to smash into Earth in about 20 years, NASA says....

A giant asteroid will make a flyby of Earth over the next few days, and armchair astronomers can watch the action live on their computers.

A space capsule has returned to Earth, ending the first commercially contracted re-supply mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The capsule was sent by the California-based company SpaceX, the first of 12 missions it will perform for US space agency Nasa... SpaceX says it is just a few years away from being able to provide an astronaut "taxi" service.

Two years ago, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., released a study claiming that inconsistencies between satellite observations of Earth's heat and measurements of ocean heating amounted to evidence of "missing energy" in the planet's system.

The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth, scientists said on Monday. "We are homing in on the true Earth-sized, habitable planets," said San Jose State University astronomer Natalie Batalha, deputy science team lead for NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that discovered the star.

A small asteroid zipped by Earth well inside the orbit of the moon on Friday, marking the second known space-rock encounter for our planet over the past week, NASA said.

A six-ton NASA science satellite crashed to Earth on Saturday, leaving a mystery about where a ton of space debris may have landed.

NASA's dead six-ton satellite fell to Earth early Saturday morning, starting its fiery death plunge somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean....

A pair of spacecraft rocketed toward the moon Saturday on the first mission dedicated to measuring lunar gravity and determining what’s inside Earth’s orbiting companion — all the way down to the core. “I could hardly be happier,” said the lead scientist, Maria Zuber. After two days of delays and almost another, “I was trying to be as calm as I could be.”

NASA says a newly discovered asteroid will have a close encounter with Earth today, but there's no need to worry.