From high-speed battering rams to gravity tractors, the technology exists to protect the planet. The question is whether humanity will act in time — and in concert.
Late last month, in broad daylight, residents across Massachusetts and beyond saw a brilliant flash in the sky, followed by two sonic booms that rattled windows, shook houses, and prompted a flood of 911 calls. Some people thought they had just experienced an earthquake. Others thought it was thunder, an explosion, or a military flyover.

But the true source of all the commotion was out of this world — literally. A small meteoroid, about five feet wide and as heavy as an elephant, had entered the atmosphere at a blinding 42,000 miles per hour before disintegrating dozens of miles above the ground. The midair explosion released a pressure wave equivalent to 230-300 tons of TNT, and any surviving fragments likely fell into Cape Cod Bay.

Since then, the story has captivated an American public already more space-crazed than usual, thanks to the recent success of Artemis II. However, it has also served as a stark reminder that space is not as benign or empty as it may seem. Rather, our solar system is a celestial shooting gallery, chock-full of flying projectiles — not just meteoroids but larger bodies, such as comets, asteroids, and other cosmic detritus — and Earth is right in the firing line. Earlier in May, for instance, the newly discovered asteroid 2026 JH2, estimated at 50 to 115 feet wide, missed Earth by a "mere" 56,000 miles. Had it been on a collision course, it could have easily destroyed a big city.

But even that would not have been humanity's worst nightmare scenario. After all, some celestial goliaths can run a lot larger than JH2 — large enough to decimate entire countries and even continents. British physicist Stephen Hawking believed that a cosmic impact poses one of the greatest threats to humanity, far greater than any global pandemic or terrestrial natural disaster. The question is not if we will suffer a direct hit but when.

If you love a good mystery, look no further than the night sky in March 2026. There were no major meteor showers scheduled for March, yet suddenly fireballs started appearing everywhere.

"During the month of March, reports of very bright fireballs to the American Meteor Society (AMS) suddenly doubled," says Mike Hankey, who manages the AMS's fireball reporting system. "Many of them were visible in broad daylight and created loud sonic booms."
A daytime fireball over Western Europe on March 8th drew more than 3,200 witness reports. Nine days later, a 7-ton asteroid exploded over Ohio with the force of 250 tons of TNT. On March 21st, a fireball broke apart above Houston, sending a fragment through the roof of a house. And those were just the headliners.

Hankey has been running the fireball reporting system for nearly 15 years (indeed, he wrote much of the software himself), so he knew something unusual was happening. When the reports kept piling up, he dove into the data -- and what he found is genuinely puzzling.

"The total number of fireballs people saw was not dramatically unusual," Hankey explains. "But the fraction of big fireballs really surged."

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will discover up to half a million solar system objects every year. It's already starting to deliver on that promise.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory promised to discover up to half a million new solar system objects each year of operation. It isn't fully operational yet, and it's already delivering on that promise.

Last week, the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center confirmed the discovery of more than 11,000 new asteroids captured by Rubin during a 1½-month observation period. That period wasn't even part of its planned Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), just a test run to check systems and optimize observations. Still, it was enough for Rubin's powerful 8.4-meter Simonyi Survey Telescope to make thousands of discoveries. While most of them are in the main asteroid belt, the list includes 380 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) that orbit beyond Neptune, and 33 previously unknown near-Earth objects.

This latest submission to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) included approximately 1 million individual observations that tracked about 90,000 objects, of which 80,000 were already known. This tally includes several "lost" objects that were discovered at some point but with orbits too uncertain to keep track of them. By reverting these orbits back in time, researchers at the MPC could backtrack their location at the time of discovery, confirming that they were the same objects. All of these numbers are additional to the 1,500 or so other asteroids identified during Rubin's "First Look" observation campaign, from when the observatory went online last year.
"The significance of this is that Rubin is just starting," says Mario Jurić (University of Washington), leader of Rubin's solar system team. Currently, there are about 1.5 million asteroids known in our solar system. At that discovery rate, the observatory is expected to bump that number by fivefold in less than a decade, well into the 6 million range. "So, this is a 'it's here, it's working, it's coming' type of demonstration," Jurić adds.

Artemis II were giddy (their words!) on the evening of April 6th when they witnessed explosions on the lunar surface. Meteoroids were hitting the Moon. "We saw at least five," reported mission commander Reid Wiseman.

The meteors appeared in middle of a solar eclipse. About an hour after the crew made their closest approach to the farside of the Moon, the sun disappeared behind the lunar disk, giving the astronauts a chance to view the first solar eclipse ever seen by humans from behind the Moon.

Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) could shine brightly in the evenings after April 4, but only if it survives a very close encounter with the sun.
A rare "sungrazer" comet is about to pass very close to our star and could become visible in daylight — or it could completely disintegrate before our eyes. Either way, there could be something special to see in the night sky, with a large tail potentially visible late this week.

Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was discovered Jan. 13 by French astronomers at the AMACS1 Observatory in Chile. Although the comet was initially thought to have a nucleus measuring around 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) wide, astronomers later reduced the estimate to under 0.25 miles (0.4 km) based on James Webb Space Telescope observations taken in February.

C/2026 A1 (MAPS) belongs to a special family of comets called Kreutz "sungrazers," so called because they get very close to the sun, lighting up brightly but often breaking into smaller pieces. There are around 3,500 members of the Kreutz family, all of which are thought to be fragments of a single giant comet that got too close to the sun about 1,700 years ago, according to Live Science's sister site Space.com.

Using preliminary data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scientists have discovered over 11,000 new asteroids. The data were confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC), making this the largest single batch of asteroid discoveries submitted in the past year. The discoveries were made using data from Rubin's early optimization surveys and offer a powerful preview of the observatory's transformative impact on solar system science.

The submission to MPC comprises approximately one million observations, taken over the span of a month and a half, of over 11,000 new asteroids and more than 80,000 already-known asteroids, including some that had previously been observed but were later "lost" because their orbits were too uncertain to predict their future locations. You can interact with all of Rubin's asteroid discoveries in the Rubin Orbitviewer, which uses real data to provide an intuitive way to explore the structure of our cosmic backyard in three dimensions and in real time.

On a Saturday afternoon this past March, a piece of the solar system plummeted toward a home in north Houston.

The one-ton space rock broke apart nearly 30 miles above the city, unleashing a violent sonic boom equivalent to 26 tons of TNT. A dark, jagged fragment smashed through a residential roof and even ricocheted around a bedroom like a cosmic pinball.

This would have been stunning in itself, except there were more such meteor strikes. During the first three months of 2026, our planet waded through an unusually dense shooting gallery. The American Meteor Society (AMS) has tracked a staggering wave of large, bright meteors — known as fireballs — lighting up skies from California to Germany.

Earth sweeps up tons of space dust every day. Usually, this material is the size of a grain of sand and burns up harmlessly in the upper atmosphere. But right now, we are colliding with much bigger rocks. And scientists are scrambling to figure out why.

Mike Hankey, a researcher who manages fireball reporting tools for the AMS, analyzed data stretching back to 2011. He shared his findings in a recent AMS report, noting this meteorite season is distinctly visible.

"After years of stable baseline activity, something appears to have shifted," Hankey wrote in the AMS report. "The signal is consistent across multiple metrics."

A visitor from the outermost reaches of the solar system is about to become a naked-eye object. Introducing Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2025 R3):

Michael Jaeger and Gerald Rhemann photographed the comet (magnitude +7.8) from Weißenkirchen, Austria: "The comet's brightness has increased significantly in recent weeks," they say. "One week after the full moon in April, it is expected to become visible to the naked eye."

Discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey in Sept. 2025, the comet is diving toward its closest approach to the sun (0.50 AU) on April 19th, bringing it well inside the orbit of Venus. If current trends continue, the comet could brighten to magnitude +2, easily seen and photographed in the pre-dawn sky.

Is Earth under siege? If you've been reading headlines about space rocks falling over Ohio and Texas, you might be wondering what's going on. According to NASA, it's nothing unusual, yet still a little mysterious.

"Spring is fireball season," says Bill Cooke of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office. "For reasons we don't fully understand, the rate of very bright meteors climbs 10% to 30% during weeks around the vernal equinox."

The Ohio and Texas meteors landed squarely in the middle of the season. Onlookers saw the Ohio fireball on March 17th only 3 days before the equinox. The Texas fireball appeared one day after the equinox on March 21st. Both were visible in broad daylight, with sonic booms and meteorites. One fragment reportedly punched through the roof of a home in suburban Houston.

"Meteorite falls--fragments that actually hit the ground--are more common in spring as well," says Cooke.

A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited, with the potential to be a spectacular sight in early April.

C/2026 A1 (MAPS) was spotted by a team of four amateur astronomers with a remotely operated telescope in the Atacama desert on January 13.

It quickly became apparent the newly discovered object was a member of a group called the Kreutz sungrazing comets. These include many of the brightest and most spectacular comets ever seen.

Comet MAPS is moving on an extreme, highly elongated orbit around the Sun, and is diving towards a fiery date with our star. In early April the comet will pass within just 120,000km of the Sun's surface.

If the comet survives, it could become a spectacular sight in the evening sky in early April. It may even become visible in broad daylight as it swings closest to the Sun - unless it falls apart before then.

So what makes these sungrazers so exciting, and what can we expect?