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Artist's depiction of a collision between two planetary bodies. Such an impact between Earth and a Mars-sized object likely formed the Moon.. The giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Theia Impact, is an astrogeology hypothesis for the formation of the Moon first proposed in 1946 by Canadian geologist Reginald Daly.
Animation of collision between Earth (blue) and Theia (black), forming the Moon (red and gray). Bodies are not to scale. According to the giant impact hypothesis, Theia orbited the Sun, nearly along the orbit of the proto-Earth, by staying close to one or the other of the Sun-Earth system's two more stable Lagrangian points (i.e., either L 4 or ...
A recently discovered asteroid, named 2024 YR4, is now the riskiest asteroid ever detected. NASA has calculated that the space rock has a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, while the European ...
99942 Apophis (provisional designation 2004 MN 4) is a near-Earth asteroid and a potentially hazardous object, 450 metres (1,480 ft) by 170 metres (560 ft) in size, [3] that caused a brief period of concern in December 2004 when initial observations indicated a probability of 2.7% that it would hit Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029.
Recent images released from NASA have revealed new information on the origins of the asteroid system. Nearly two years ago, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test spacecraft, or DART, collided with ...
The impact site was not examined by scientists until 20 years later, when they discovered the asteroid carved a massive area of destruction of around 830 square miles, according to NASA.
The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) was a NASA space mission aimed at testing a method of planetary defense against near-Earth objects (NEOs). [4] [5] It was designed to assess how much a spacecraft impact deflects an asteroid through its transfer of momentum when hitting the asteroid head-on. [6]
When NASA sent its DART spacecraft to slam into the asteroid Dimorphos in 2022, the U.S. space agency demonstrated that it was possible to change a celestial object's trajectory, if needed, to ...