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Mostly better source article appeared recently in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31616340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31616340 NASA has had a d
by mturmon 4y ago
Mostly better source article appeared recently in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31616340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31616340
NASA has had a dedicated search for many years: https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/
Just detecting these objects in past images isn’t helpful if the orbit can’t be constrained enough to continue tracking it!
- gammarator 4y agoIn many cases the new asteroid discoveries can then be used to identify other apparitions of the same object that were previously not recognized as being asteroids. That enables further orbit refinement.
- mturmon 4y agoSome colleagues have been involved with the NEO detection effort, so I felt called to mention that problem, which does limit the usefulness of these detections, and illustrates one of the system level problems. From the Wired article in the post I linked: > The THOR team has shown the potential to map out the trajectories of numerous asteroids in our neighborhood, but there are few key caveats. Since their images date from a few years ago, asteroids that haven’t been reobserved lately have effectively been lost at this point, although they could be picked up again in newer images down the road, says Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.