On a commercial thoroughfare in old town Pasadena, California, a stone's throw from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), you'll find the Neon Retro Arcade. Among its collection of vintage video games is the 1979 Atari classic Asteroids, in which a pixelated spaceship shoots down a barrage of space rocks to stave off fatal collisions. After long days of work at JPL, Amy Mainzer used to rack up high scores on that console. "It was a hoot," she says. It was also apt, considering she oversees a space mission designed to spot dangerous asteroids before they crash into Earth. That mission, the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor, was conceived in the early 2000s and finally got the green light in 2022. Its components are now being built, tested, and assembled in clean rooms across the United States ahead of its planned launch in September 2027. "We're in the thick of building everything," says Mainzer, NEO Surveyor's principal investigator and now an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Following its successes retrieving lunar samples from both the near and far sides of the Moon, China is planning an encore, sending a probe to snatch material from a near-Earth asteroid. The target of the Tianwen-2 mission, which is expected to launch by the end of the month, is a chunk of rock named 469219 Kamo'oalewa. It is one of just seven asteroids that fall into a little-understood class known as quasi-satellites of Earth--and it could also be the first known asteroid comprised of lunar material. That hypothesis could be confirmed by laboratory studies of fragments collected by Tianwen-2, which are due to be returned to Earth about 2.5 years after launch. "This is an ambitious mission to explore a fascinating object," says astrophysicist Amy Mainzer of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Its cargo is so precious it could help answer some of humanity's biggest existential questions. That's why there is so much excitement about the return of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which will drop a capsule full of 4.5 billion-year-old space dust back to Earth on Sunday. The 8.8oz (250g) sample, audaciously grabbed from the mountain-sized asteroid Bennu in October 2020, could shed light on how life emerged on Earth and whether we are alone in the universe. OSIRIS-REx began its two-year, four-month journey home in May 2021, having been powered down to conserve energy during the trip. In the early hours of Sunday, however, the probe will be woken from this low-power mode ahead of its all-important delivery.

NASA has spent seven years trying to prevent Bennu -- an asteroid taller than the Empire State Building and named after ancient Egypt's fiery bird-god -- from crashing cataclysmically into Earth. While Bennu's chances of impact are just 1-in-2,700, more than five times a person's chance of being struck by lightning, NASA's team nevertheless has categorized it as one of the two'most hazardous known asteroids.' In a worst-case scenario, the roughly 510-meter wide, carbon-based behemoth would smash into Earth with 1,200 megatons of energy: 24 times the power of the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated (the Soviet Union's'Tsar Bomba'). If it happens, Bennu's impact would unleash its 1.2 gigaton impact 159 years from this Sunday, on September 24, 2182. While Bennu is nowhere near the size of the dino-killing, six-mile across space rock that hit the Yucatan 66 million years ago, astronomers believe that the asteroid'could cause continental devastation if it became an Earth impactor.'

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will leave asteroid Bennu today and begin its 1.4 billion mile, two year long journey back to the Earth, the space agency confirmed. OSIRIS-REx (the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) was the first NASA mission to visit a near-Earth asteroid, survey the surface, and collect a sample to deliver to Earth. The spaceship was sent to study Bennu, an asteroid around the size of the Empire State Building and 200 million miles away, between the orbit of Earth and Mars. OSIRIS-REx gathered 2.1 ounces (60 grams) of rock and dust during its land and grab mission to the surface of the giant space rock, filling its storage compartment. It will begin its long journey home at 21:00 BST (16:00 EDT), with a live broadcast from NASA sharing the moment it fires its thrusters to push away from Bennu's orbit. If all goes to plan, OSIRIS-REx will orbit the sun twice, travelling 1.4 billion miles as it lines up with Earth, returning its samples in Utah on September 24, 2023.

NASA has captured an incredible close-up shot of plumes of dust and rocks erupting from the surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu as it spins through the solar system. Researchers from the University of Arizona have been studying the images taken by the navigation camera on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The high-resolution images were taken as part of a NASA mission to bring samples of the asteroid - that is about 300,000miles away - back to Earth for scientists to study. These images offer a detailed look at small-scale rock and particle loss from an active asteroid for the first time, say researchers. Previous studies have been limited to only the largest ejections seen from Earth. More than 20,000 known near-Earth asteroids are travelling around the solar system at any given time according to NASA.

Hosted by the SETI Institute, NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) is an AI R&D accelerator that teams planetary and data scientists, adds leading edge technical resources and skills from the private sector and tackles knowledge gaps useful to the space program. FDL teams address tightly defined problems and its format encourages rapid iteration and prototyping to create outputs that have meaningful application. In 2016, three teams developed breakthrough solutions in meteor discovery, shape modeling and deflection scenarios. Each team included two data scientists and two planetary astronomers, and were mentored by SETI Institute scientists Michael Busch, Peter Jenniskens and Franck Marchis. To deepen and diversify each group's scientific and technological work, experts from the fields of planetary science, machine learning and deep thinking, drone technology, space-based technology, and space-mission design and operation were also asked to guide the three groups.

An asteroid as big as a bus came closer to Earth than the moon last night. The object, dubbed 2017 FJ101, zoomed passed within 202,000 miles (325,087 km) of our planet. But the near-Earth asteroid posed no threat to our planet or the moon, scientists said. An asteroid as big as a bus came closer to Earth than the moon last night. According to an asteroid-impact simulator called'Impact Earth!' by Purdue University, if a porous rock asteroid of 111 feet (34 meters) long hit Earth at a 45-degree angle, the simulator found, it would have exploded as an air burst.

While the idea of tinkering with asteroids might seem like a bad idea, countries around the world are thinking of doing just that. Asteroid mining could be the next big way to harvest resources such as water, oxygen and metals. Now Nasa has awarded 100,000 ( 70,000) to a company to develop technology to direct asteroids towards Earth in order to more easily access them. Nasa has awarded the funding to Made in Space - a California-based company who manufacture technology for space environments. Nasa has awarded the funding to Made in Space - a California-based company who manufacture technology for space environments. The initial 100,000 funding gives the company nine months to prove whether a system to turn asteroids into self-propelled AI spaceships, is viable.