11 articles
2018 LA
2018 LA was a small asteroid discovered in space on 2 June 2018 that impacted Earth's atmosphere over Botswana about eight hours later, producing the Motopi Pan meteorites.
Asteroid impact avoidance
Asteroid impact avoidance, also known as asteroid deflection or planetary defense, aims to prevent dangerous near-Earth objects from hitting Earth, demonstrated by NASA's DART mission in 2022.
Asteroid impact prediction
Asteroid impact prediction is the process of computing near-Earth object orbits and estimating collision probabilities with Earth, carried out continuously by NASA's Sentry and ESA's Aegis monitoring systems.
Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System
The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) is a NASA-funded network of robotic telescopes in Hawaii, Chile, and South Africa that scans the sky nightly for incoming asteroids.
Center for Near-Earth Object Studies
The Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) is a NASA office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, computing precise orbits for near-Earth asteroids and comets.
Hoba meteorite
The Hoba meteorite is the largest known intact meteorite on Earth, an iron of about 60 metric tons lying where it fell near Grootfontein in northern Namibia.
Impact event
An impact event, also called an Earth impact, is a collision between an asteroid or comet and Earth or another body, leaving a crater or causing an airburst.
International Asteroid Warning Network
The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) is a UN-endorsed, NASA-coordinated collaboration of asteroid astronomers, created in 2013 after the Chelyabinsk airburst, that tracks hazardous near-Earth objects and issues impact warnings.
List of asteroid close approaches to Earth
The list of asteroid close approaches to Earth catalogs near-Earth objects passing within 0.05 au of Earth; the closest on record, in 2025, passed about 230 km up.
Meteorite
A meteorite, also called an aerolite, is a natural solid object from space that survives its fiery passage through an atmosphere. Most come from asteroids, with a few from the Moon and Mars.
Murchison meteorite
The Murchison meteorite is a carbonaceous chondrite that fell near Murchison, Victoria, Australia, in September 1969, becoming one of the most studied meteorites for its organic compounds.