"Scientifically there's a huge amount we can learn from asteroids," says Alan Fitzsimmons, an astronomer at Queens University ...

Floating around at the edge of the Solar System are leftovers from its formation. This is the Kuiper Belt, which is composed ...

But this is no distant celestial body - this is a massive 2,560-foot-wide asteroid heading straight for Earth. The rock is roughly the size of Didymos, a double asteroid system studied by NASA's ...

The asteroid was first reported to the Minor Planet Center – the international clearing house for small body positional measurements ... destruction to a city. The last time an asteroid ...

Located in the northern coastal city of Yantai ... Launch Center on a trajectory to visit both an asteroid and a comet in a mission double-header. The craft arrived at Xichang last week on ...

to the Minor Planet Centre - an official body for observing and reporting on small planets. The asteroid, estimated to be about 130 to 300 feet wide, is big enough to potentially wipe out a city.

Even more recently, on June 30, 1908, an asteroid plunged into Earth's atmosphere and exploded in the skies over Siberia, and on Feb. 15, 2013, residents of the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia ...

potentially collapsing residential structures across a city and shattering windows across larger regions. If the asteroid does head for Earth and is of a size that could cause devastation, a kinetic ...

Even though the asteroid is relatively small, it could still be what some are calling a "city killer" because if it were to hit Earth, it could cause significant devastation in a populous area.