Late yesterday, NASA turned the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California toward Asteroid 1998 QE2 as it was heading toward its closest approach to Earth, and they got a big surprise: the asteroid is a binary system. 1998 QE2 itself is 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) in diameter, and the newly found orbiting moon is about 600 meters in diameter.

The radar images were taken were taken on May 29, 2013, when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth.

“Radar really helps to pin down the orbit of an asteroid as well as the size of it,” said Paul Chodas of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program office, speaking during a JPL webcast about this asteroid on May 30. “We now know our size estimates were pretty good, but finding it was a binary was surprising.”

NASA said that about 16 percent of asteroids are binary or even triple systems.

A 72-year-old man was fatally shot as Fort Worth police investigated an alarm call early Tuesday morning in a neighborhood near the Woodhaven County Club.

According to Fort Worth police, authorities responded to the alarm call just before 1 a.m. in the 400 block of North Havenwood Lane. Upon arriving to the scene, officers become involved in a confrontation with a man armed with a gun. Feeling threatened, at least one officer fired at the man, who was later identified by a neighbor as Jerry Waller, police said. Waller died at the scene.

Becky Haskin, a former city council member, lives nearby and said she and her husband heard five rapid shots. Haskin said she believes Waller heard the alarm and went to the house armed to investigate.

Haskin said there was no sign of a burglary at the home and that the alarm may have triggered accidentally.

On a sprawling complex just outside Pretoria, South Africa, a government-owned arms manufacturer is preparing to test an armed drone that it hopes to begin selling soon to governments around the world.

The company, Denel Dynamics, says the armed version of the Seeker 400, which will carry two laser-guided missiles, will enable so-called opportunistic targeting at a range of up to about 155 miles.

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And according to Peter Singer, director of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institute, at least 26 countries have surveillance drones of a size or type that have been or could be armed, and roughly 20 countries are trying to either develop or acquire weaponized drones.

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The company aims to be among the first suppliers of armed drones to market, if tests of the armed versions of the Seeker 400 -- expected to begin in “a month or two” and last up to six months, according to Ntsihlele -- are successful. South Africa would have to purchase the armed drones first before the company would begin marketing them elsewhere, but if that happens Denel sees opportunities for growth elsewhere, particularly in “Africa and the Middle East,” he said.

Ntsihlele declined to say how much the armed Seeker 400 will cost, but said it will be far cheaper than the Predator and Reaper, the armed drones used for anti-terrorism operations by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, which cost approximately $20 million and $56.5 million apiece, respectively. And unlike those UAVs, it would not require satellite technology, being controlled instead through “line of sight” communications. That limits its range but makes it potentially available to nations without sophisticated space-based guidance systems.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon will release the annual report on sexual assaults in the military, which shows some startling numbers.

While the report will show that the number of reported assaults in fiscal year 2012 rose only 6 percent to 3,374 — up from 3,192 a year before — the number of people who made an anonymous claim that they were sexually assaulted but never reported the attack skyrocketed from 19,000 in FY11 to 26,000 in FY12.

Members of Congress will be briefed on the report early tomorrow afternoon, and then Major General Gary Patton, the Director of the DoD Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office (SAPRO), will brief the media.

Embarrassingly, the report is being made public just a day after it was revealed that the Air Force's sexual-abuse prevention chief has himself been charged with sexual assault.

PORTLAND -- The Oregon Zoo will honor one of its animals with a Mother of the Year award next week, and the three finalists were announced Thursday.

"This year’s finalists are a De Brazza’s monkey named Brooke, a North American river otter named Tilly, and an Asian elephant named Rose-Tu," said spokesman Hova Najarian.

He offered a quick argument in each animal's case:

Brooke has been keeping her 2-month-old so close that the zoo’s animal-care staff only recently determined the baby’s gender.
Tilly is a first-time mom, but keepers say she’s been doing all the right things for her 3-month-old pup, Mo.
Rose-Tu required full-time help with early binding after her first calf, Samudra, was born. But with new calf Lilly, keepers say her maternal nature took over right away.

"These moms all represent species whose natural habitats are threatened, and they’ve each done a lot to inspire zoo visitors," said zoo director Kim Smith.