When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. (Main) An image of the asteroid Ryugu as seen by the Japanese mission Hayabusa2 (Top right) a ...

The size of an asteroid is primarily determined by observing the sunlight it reflects, combined with distance, brightness, ...

Imagine that, for billions of years, you're a grain of material unbothered on asteroid Ryugu. All of a sudden, a spacecraft ...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Hayabusa 2 asteroid sample return mission will drop off materials from the asteroid Ryugu as it passes by Earth on Dec. 6 Japan time. The sample ...

Last year, researchers excitedly announced that they had found two organic compounds essential for living organisms in samples retrieved from a distant asteroid called Ryugu. The Japanese Space Agency ...

China's Tianwen-2 asteroid sample return mission is set to launch this month, May 2025, en route to the asteroid Kamoʻoalewa (2016 HO3). The country could join the United States and Japan, whose space ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese capsule carrying the ...

UA student Adriana Mitchell sees her future in space — and is getting the chance now to do work on a mission to an asteroid. “Ultimately I want to be an astronaut, especially doing research on the ...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Samples of an asteroid 300 million km from Earth arrived in Japan on Tuesday to applause and smiles, the climax of a six-year odyssey by a space probe pursuing the origins of life.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Samples of dust collected by a Japanese space probe from an asteroid some 300 million km (186 million miles) from Earth were better than hoped for, with one researcher saying he was ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) Several space missions have flown by asteroids before and gotten a peek at their ...