Earth Planet

An asteroid widely reported to be on a near-collision course with Earth actually will miss the planet by 600,000 miles, astronomers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Thursday. The JPL scientists used new data to calculate the path of the mile-wide planetoid. On Wednesday, the International Astronomical Union reported that on its closest approach to Earth in 2028, the asteroid is expected to pass within only 30,000 miles of the Earth's center and that "the chance of an actual collision is small, but one is not entirely out of the question.

It comes as no surprise to Southern Californians that solid Earth moves. But until recently, geologists believed that these periodic rumblings were mostly skin-deep.

Worried by a recent incident in which an erroneous report of a doomsday asteroid caused worldwide headlines, government scientists have begun an exercise in the ultimate spin control: How to handle news of a disaster that could destroy the planet.

There is a small but significant chance that an asteroid will strike Earth in 2030 with a force up to 100 times the Hiroshima bomb, an international team of astronomers concluded Friday.

When the Galileo spacecraft swept past Earth earlier this month it revealed what it would be like to be aboard an alien spacecraft visiting the planet, and it collected clues that may help solve a number of scientific mysteries, scientists said Wednesday.

The end of the universe as humans know it will occur in about 10 trillion years, but certain physical processes will continue as far into the future as astronomers can imagine, according to researchers from the University of Michigan.