Two stubborn fasteners on the glove-box sized Touch-and-Go Sample Acquisition instrument has kept NASA scientists from reaching material collected by OSIRIS-REx in its mission to asteroid Bennu. But after weeks pf effort NASA recently announced success in gaining the precious cargo.

The European Space Agency has plans to send a spacecraft to visit the asteroid Dimorphos and its tiny moon Didymos as a follow up to NASA’s DART mission which impacted the moon as a proof of concept for asteroid defense. The mission, dubbed Hera, will seek to answer questions about how the DART spacecraft’s collision affected the moon. “We need another spacecraft to go back to the crime scene in order to tell whether the impact left a crater or entirely reshaped the asteroid, because with the current data both scenarios are possible,” said Hera mission head Patrick Michel at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in France.

Hera is currently slated for an October 2024 launch, arriving at Dimorphos in December of 2026. The main craft will approach as close as 1 km to the asteroid while its two “cube satellites” will be dispatched to land on the target.

Fresh from a successful mission return samples from asteroid Bennu, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been recommissioned for a journey to study asteroid Apophis during its 2029 flyby of Earth. Renamed to OSIRIS-APEX, it will visit Apophis which is an "S-type" asteroid made of silicate materials and nickel-iron compared to the carbon-rich, "C-type" Bennu. By April 2, 2029—around two weeks before Apophis' close encounter with Earth— OSIRIS-APEX's cameras will begin taking images of the asteroid as the spacecraft catches up to it. In the hours after the close encounter, Apophis will appear too near the sun in the sky to be observed by ground-based optical telescopes. This means any changes triggered by the close encounter will be best detected by the spacecraft.

Volunteers working with The Daily Minor Planet program recently discovered an asteroid passing near Earth. A telescope that is part of the Catalina Sky Survey snapped four pictures of the northern sky, and the next day volunteers spotted a clear streak moving through each image. After notifying the Daily Minor Planet team other telescopes world-wide were trained on it to confirm the asteroid’s orbit. Those calculations revealed that the asteroid would pass by Earth about twice as far as the moon the following week and that it was about 50 meters in diameter.

NASA launched its mission to the asteroid Psyche, a mysterious world made largely of metal. The Psyche mission lifted off at 10:19 a.m. ET Friday aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The spacecraft will arrive at Mars in May 2026 where it’ll use the planet’s gravity to effectively slingshot its trajectory to the asteroid, arriving in late July 2029.

NASA successfully recovered the sample return package from its OSIRIS-REx mission to Bennu on Sunday, marking its first return of samples from an asteroid in deep space. Teams with NASA and the U.S. Air Force located the capsule following its touchdown at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The capsule contains about 9 oz of rocks and other material from Bennu that scientists are eager to study to learn more about the early days of our solar system.

Recent observations show that NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission has been a solid success. The spacecraft’s impact on Dimorphos altered the asteroid’s orbit around Didymos by 32 minutes. This marks mankind's first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object as well as the viability of asteroid deflection technology.

The investigation team is still acquiring data with ground-based observatories around the world - as well as with radar facilities at JPL’s Goldstone planetary radar in California and the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia. They are updating the period measurement with frequent observations to improve its precision.