NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: All Known Asteroids in the Solar System (1999-2018)
Posted on 07/25/2018 2:14:03 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Scientists have taken much better stock of our neck of the cosmic woods over the past two decades, as a new NASA video makes clear.
The animation maps out all known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) -- space rocks that get within about 30 million miles (50 million kilometers) of our planet's orbit -- from 1999 through January 2018, in roughly 10-year time steps.
The differences are stark. In 1999, identified NEAs speckled the inner solar system thinly, in a light dusting. Many more were discovered by 2009, and Earth's neighborhood looks absolutely swamped in the present-day portion of the video.
But even that last frame doesn't impart just how crowded near-Earth space actually is. Astronomers have detected just 18,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs, a classification that also includes comets) to date, out of a population thought to number in the millions.
There's good news, though: NASA scientists have found and tracked about 95 percent of the potential civilization-enders out there -- rocks at least 0.6 miles (1 km) wide -- and none of them pose a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.
The space agency's NEO Observations Program is also working to discover and track 90 percent of the NEOs that are at least 450 feet (140 meters) wide by 2020 -- a very ambitious goal laid out by Congress in 2005. It would take something of a miracle for NASA to do this on the prescribed timetable, however; scientists estimate that just one-third of the 450-footers out there have been spotted to date.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: All Known Asteroids in the Solar System (1999-2018)
Trump’s fault......and the Russians
Obviously Earth hasn’t cleared it’s orbit and thus isn’t a planet.
/ Kidding
Taking into consideration the scale factors.... the effect would be negligible and the graphic would not appear cluttered ?
Collusion!!!! /s
Hey, Earth’s only had four and a half billion years to get ‘er done.
All the signs all there....
I too hate when a planet refuses to clean up around itself ...
Don’t stare at them, Dear. You’ just attract their attention. Lock the car doors and just keep driving until we’re out of the asteroid field.
The Erf needs to be renamed as Goofy.
Former Planets have dog names.
450 feet wide? I doubt that those are really anything to worry about. Meteorites hit the earth all the time. There are some claims, but no good evidence of any person being hit by one. Big asteroids are worth watching.
Was thinking the same thing. We need more gravity.
For reference, the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor was estimated to be roughly 65ft. According to wikipedia, it is thought to have released 26-33x as much energy as the atomic bomb used on Hiroshima.
That's easy for you to say, until you get hit on the head with one. Just sayin'.
It's well known that a woman in Alabama (she was a beefy gal, but still) was hit by a meteorite which knocked a hole through the roof on the way in. The imbecile Carl Sagan flat-out denied that anyone else or even livestock had ever been hit by one, because the reports came from rural areas in Africa and so forth.
Meteor Crater in Arizona is 3/4 of a mile across and 1/4 mile deep, and was formed by an object about 300 feet wide. So, yes, 450 feet is worth worrying about.
Thanks!
Thanks. As a side note, an object a mere mile across would deliver more energy than the simultaneous explosion of all the Earth's nuclear weapons.
Can't argue against the name Goofy, that's for sure. :^)
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