Great, if not somewhat alarmist headline from the folks at New Scientist! AN ASTEROID that had initially been deemed harmless has turned out to have a slim chance of hitting Earth in 160 years. While that might seem a distant threat, there’s far less time available to deflect it off course. Asteroid 1999 RQ36 was [...]

Apparently, math is harder than rocket science: A 13-year-old German schoolboy corrected NASA’s estimates on the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth, a German newspaper reported Tuesday, after spotting the boffins had miscalculated. Nico Marquardt used telescopic findings from the Institute of Astrophysics in Potsdam (AIP) to calculate that there was a 1 in [...]

A draft UN treaty to determine what would be have to be done if a giant asteroid was on a collision course with Earth is to be drawn up this year. The document would set out global policies including who should be in charge of plans to deflect any object. It is the brainchild of [...]

A $50,000 (£25,000) competition has been launched by the Planetary Society to find the best way to tag a 400m-wide asteroid. The Planetary Society will give a prize to the designers of a mission that would allow the orbit of Apophis, an Earth-crossing asteroid to be which will come close to Earth in 2029 and [...]

The risk to the Earth from an asteroid called Apophis has been cut dramatically.  The odds of the 320 meter asteroid hitting the Earth in 2036 have gone from 1 in 5,500 to 1 in 24,000.  This change is based on new orbital measurements which changed the orbital speed by 6 millimeters per second.  Apophis now [...]