Asteroids Galore
June 12th 2011 05:40
Category: Cosmic Objects
Since the first asteroid was discovered some 200 years ago astronomers have been wondering how many more asteroids are out there. There have been many that have been discovered during this time ranging in various dimensions, Asteroid Ceres is the size of Texas and perhaps one of the biggest.
There are three more asteroids of comparable size to Ceres but there are plenty more asteroids some can be to the size of a small car to large mountains, and many more that we just have not seen because of the distance involved.
CURRENT MOON
The NASA mission launched in 2009 called Wide field Infrared Survey (WISE).
The WISE mission objective was to map the entire sky in the infra red wavelength. Shortly after completing it’s primary mission the cooling system failed, the coolant keeps the camera noise level to a minimum, lower noise means better images.
The remaining cameras continued to gather data for a further four months forming the NEOWISE mission. NEOWISE was instigated to help find other asteroids and comets. At mission end NEOWISE had found more than 33,000 new main belt objects.
A further 134 near Earth objects and comets.
NEOWISE has discovered 20 new comets since the survey was undertaken.
These near Earth objects are comets and asteroids that come within 45 million Km of Earth’s orbit.
NEOWISE had taken longer to map the entire asteroid belt than WISE took to survey the night sky. The reason is that the asteroids travel in the same direction as the Earth around the Sun. The WISE portion of the mission had to catch up with the asteroids and then sling shot past and over take them in order to under take a wide field view.
There is some data suggesting the presence of a very distant planetary object perhaps the size of Jupiter beyond our Solar system that may explain why long period comets seem to cluster in that area.
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Astroearth
Camera Sense
Yes is seems that way, there is more stuff out there than we thought.