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Newly-Discovered Asteroid 2012 BX34 Makes A Close Flyby Past Earth Today

Named 2012 BX34, this 14 meter space rock will skim Earth less than 60,000 km (37,000 miles, .0004 AU), at around 15:30 UTC, (10:30 am EST) according to the Minor Planet Center. The latest estimates have this small bus-sized asteroid it traveling at about about 8,900 meters/second (about 20,000 miles per hour). 2012 BX34 has been observed by the Catalina Sky Survey and the Mt. Lemmon Survey in Arizona, and the Magdalena Ridge Observatory in New Mexico, so its orbit is well defined and there is no risk of impact to Earth. Advanced amateur astronomers might be able to...

Left to right: Nia Shea Ashby, Zeth Ashby, and their mother Karson Ashby learn how to focus one of the NHAS’s loaner Orion StarBlast telescopes.

An astronomy club’s outreach program gets telescopes into peoples’ hands. “The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s a telescope. Someone in every town seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.” The words of Robert Frost in The Star...

This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is spending its fifth Martian winter, an outcrop informally named "Greeley Haven." Opportunity's Panoramic Camera (Pancam) took the component images as part of full-circle view being assembled from Greeley Haven. The view includes sand ripples and other wind-sculpted features in the foreground and mid-field. The northern edge of the the "Cape York" segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater forms an arc across the upper half of the scene. Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time and EST (Jan. 24, PST). It has driven 21.4 miles (34.4 kilometers) as of its eighth anniversary on the planet. In late 2011, the rover team drove Opportunity up onto Greeley Haven to take advantage of the outcrop's sun-facing slope to boost output from the rover's dusty solar panels during the Martian winter. Research activities while at Greeley Haven include a radio-science investigation of the interior of Mars, inspections of mineral compositions and textures on the outcrop, and monitoring of wind-caused changes on scales from dunes to individual soil particles. The image combines exposures taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in approximate true color. This "natural color" is the rover team's best estimate of what the scene would look like if humans were there and able to see it with their own eyes. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA’s enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago. Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At...

A team of astronomers led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has discovered the three smallest confirmed planets ever detected outside our solar system. The alien...

The image above shows the radio signal detected by the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia while scanning the exoplanetary candidate KOI 817 discovered by the Kepler mission. This is the kind of signal SETI scientists would expect to find if an alien civilization is transmitting.

In an effort to detect the radio emissions from a hypothetical extraterrestrial intelligence, it helps to know where to look. So, using data from the Kepler space telescope, astronomers...

The Quadrantids, one of the three best meteor showers of the year, reach their peak with an zenithal hourly rate of 120 meteors per hour.

The first major shower of 2012 is the Quadrantids meteor shower. This annual shower has one of the highest predicted hourly rates of all the major showers, and is...