Maxime DevogèleĪlthough 2020 XL 5 is expected to remain in its current configuration for at least another 4,000 years, it is still only a temporary neighbor. NASA’s massive James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, has just arrived at another Lagrange point near Earth and will begin a new era of astronomical observations starting this summer. NASA’s Lucy mission, launched late 2021, will explore six of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Thousands of Trojan asteroids are located at the Lagrange points near Jupiter. Trojan asteroids get “trapped” in locations in space known as Lagrange points where the gravitational tug between a planet and the sun balance one another.
This asteroid doesn’t pose any danger and is expected to tag along Earth for about 4,000 years.Īsteroids that share an orbit with a planet are called Trojan asteroids. These observations were conducted as part of a NASA program to observe recently discovered asteroids that could potentially pose a hazard to the Earth, Devogèle says. The scientists found additional confirmation by looking at data sets collected by other telescopes from 2012-2015. So, it gets tricky aligning telescopes at just the right time to find the asteroids. These telescopes were ideal because asteroids that share orbits of their host planets tend to ride near the sun. The Optical Ground Station in Tenerife of Spain’s Canary Islands, and the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile were also used. 62 miles-wide and is made up of rock and carbon-containing materials.ĭevogèle used the Lowell Discovery Telescope in Arizona to obtain the images of 2020 XL 5. The data also indicates the asteroid is about. Three ground-based telescopes were used to confirm the asteroid. National Science Foundation under a cooperative agreement. Maxime Devogèle, a UCF research scientist, and part of the planetary radar group at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was part of the team. Toni Santana-Ros, from the University of Alicante and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona led the study.
The team’s work is published in this week’s Nature Communications journal. The revelation is important because these Earth Trojans may help explain how planets formed in the solar system. The mission will help test the viability of asteroid deflection, should some future asteroid pose an imminent danger to our planet.Earth has discovered it has a secret valentine - an asteroid called 2020 XL 5.Īn international team of astronomers confirmed this week that the asteroid shares our planet’s orbit, only the second asteroid ever discovered to do that. The collision won't destroy the asteroid, but it may change the space rock's orbital path (opens in new tab) slightly, Live Science previously reported. In November 2021, NASA launched an asteroid-deflecting spacecraft called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), which will slam directly into the 525-foot-wide (160 m) asteroid Dimorphos in autumn (opens in new tab) 2022. Even if an asteroid's trajectory puts it millions of miles from our planet, there is an extremely slim chance that the asteroid's orbit could shift slightly after interacting with the gravity of a larger object, such as a planet even such a tiny shift could potentially put an asteroid on a collision course with Earth on a future flyby.Īs such, space agencies take planetary defense very seriously. NASA and other space agencies closely monitor thousands of near-Earth objects like these. What are the largest impact craters on Earth? (opens in new tab) What happened when the dinosaur-killing asteroid slammed into Earth? (opens in new tab) How many satellites orbit Earth? (opens in new tab)
0 kommentar(er)
