Washington, June 19 (ANI): Astrophysicists from the Complutense University of Madrid have confirmed that Crantor, a large asteroid with a diameter of 70 km, has an orbit similar to that of Uranus and takes the same amount of time to orbit the Sun.

Washington, June 18 (ANI): After an extensive year-and-a-half search, NASA has picked eight new potential astronauts who will help the agency push the boundaries of exploration and travel to new destinations in the solar system, including an asteroid and Mars.

Washington, June 17 (ANI): Scientists have discovered that a big asteroid that flew past Earth last month belongs to a new category of space rock, thanks to new radar images captured by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

Johannesburg, June 9 (ANI): On Saturday, an asteroid the size of a small truck zoomed past Earth four times closer than the moon.

Washington, June 5 (ANI): A mysterious object discovered by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 2010 has been identified as a dying asteroid.

Washington, June 2 (ANI): What if an asteroid were headed straight for Earth?

Washington, May 30 (ANI): Astronomers have completed a new and improved family tree for asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, thanks to NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

Washington, May 29 (ANI): On Friday, May 31st, at one minute to five in the afternoon (Eastern time), an impressive asteroid named 1998 QE2 will whiz past Earth at its closest approach for the next two centuries.

Washington, May 23 (ANI): A piece of asteroid that fell on earth after its impact on Mars is up for grabs.

Washington, May 19 (ANI): Asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail past Earth on May 31, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Washington, May 18 (ANI): Researchers from the SETI Institute, the Mars Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, and the space robotics company Honeybee Robotics, have successfully completed a first series of field tests aimed at investigating how humans will explore and work on near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) and eventually the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos.

Washington, May 17 (ANI): The Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx), the NASA's first mission to sample an asteroid, passed a confirmation review Wednesday called Key Decision Point (KDP)-C.

Washington, May 16 (ANI): Using images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), scientists have estimated that the red planet is bombarded by more than 200 small asteroids or bits of comets per year forming craters at least 12.8 feet (3.9 meters) across.

Washington, May 16 (ANI): Asteroid 1998 QE2 will sail past Earth on May 31, getting no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

Washington, May 8 (ANI): Experts have assessed what needs to be done when an asteroid approaches earth, like the one in February, when one slammed into our atmosphere and exploded high over Russia's Ural region, injuring hundreds.

Washington, Apr 17 (ANI): Like many of his colleagues, Indian origin deep space navigator Shyam Bhaskaran devotes a great deal of time to crafting, and contemplating, computer-generated 3D models of asteroids.

Washington, April 16 (ANI): A NASA funded infrared sensor that could improve the agency's future detecting and tracking of asteroids and comets has passed a critical design test.

Washington, April 10 (ANI): Thanks to the sensitive far-infrared detection capabilities of the ESA's Herschel space observatory, astronomers have been able to obtain the first images of a dust belt - produced by colliding comets or asteroids - orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system.

Washington, Apr 6 (ANI): Early in 2012, someone in Southern Morocco picked up 35 greenish stones, which is believed to be fragments of a meteorite from Mercury.

New York, Apr 6 (ANI): President Barack Obama and NASA are planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon.

Moscow, April 5 (Xinhua-ANI): Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos mulled over joining an asteroid defense program with the U.S. NASA, the agency's head Vladimir Popovkin has said.

Washington, April 5 (ANI): Most scientists agree that an asteroid impact killed off almost all the dinosaurs and some 70 percent of all other species living on Earth about 66 million years ago.

Washington, April 3 (ANI): Researchers are trying to understand the nature of the turbulence in protoplanetary disks to find out how this swirling masses of warm dust and gas may potentially become celestial bodies such as planets and asteroids.

Washington, March 28 (ANI): The impact of the Manhattan-sized asteroid into a region of Mexico in the dinosaur days could have triggered a global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth's species, a new University of Colorado Boulder study has suggested.

Washington, March 27 (ANI): About 66 million years ago a mountain-sized asteroid hit what is now the Yucatan in Mexico at exactly the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction.