NASA recently repurposed a satellite name WISE that had completed its delegation with all instruments intact and quite a bit of fuel . Renaming the mission NEOWISE , the quad agency gave the satellite a raw job : map the full volume of space in the vicinity of Earth ’s orbit around the sun , looking for every possible rock candy , boulder , or planetoid that could maybe taste into our Blue Marble . What they discovered caused them to build an entirely new mannikin of the outer space junk in our quick area ( see figure above ) .
What scientist found when they pored over the NEOWISE data was surprising — there were many fewer rocks floating out there than they expected to find . Dubbed “ near - Earth object , ” or NEOs , these potential meteorite are consider among the most dangerous threats to the planet from space . Indeed , it ’s likely that an NEO colliding with Earth lend to the extinction of the dinosaurs , so it ’s imperative that scientist roll in the hay where all of our current NEOs are .
90 percent of NEOs have now been mapped , which means that astronomer can keep an eye on them to be certain none are about to start thrust towards us . NASA account :
“ NEOWISE allowed us to take a look at a more representative fade of the near - terra firma asteroid numbers and make better estimates about the whole population , ” say Amy Mainzer , conduct writer of the new study and principal investigator for the NEOWISE project at NASA ’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena , Calif. “ It ’s like a population nosecount , where you poll a little group of multitude to pull in close about the total country ” . . . It is believed that all near - world asteroids just about 6 miles ( 10 klick ) across , as vainglorious as the one imagine to have wiped out the dinosaurs , have been found .
“ The risk of a really with child asteroid impacting the Earth before we could observe and warn of it has been substantially reduced , ” said Tim Spahr , the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge , Mass.
viaNASA
AstronomyScienceSpace
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