4 ms·
"NASA's goal is to find 90 percent of those that are one kilometer across and larger. We're at 82 percent right now, and we've only been aggressively searching
by endtime 18y ago
"NASA's goal is to find 90 percent of those that are one kilometer across and larger. We're at 82 percent right now, and we've only been aggressively searching at current levels for eight to 10 years. Those ones just haven't flown into view."
Can anyone work out/explain how they know they're detecting 82% of them?
- jrockway 18y agoThey've detected all of them, but they are only going to talk about 82% of them until they get more money. "Freemium research", I'll call it...
- ramchip 18y ago...I don't know, but a more serious idea would be that the mass of everything they found so far is 82% of the mass they'd expect to find according to simulations. Like all those planets they discovered because their mass had an influence on nearby bodies. Not saying this is the actual reason, just that there are reasonable ways to get a number like this...
- endtime 18y agoYeah, I was wondering about something like that too, but as they are putting constraints on the single bodies of mass I'm not sure that's sufficient.
- inerte 18y agoProbably they came to know about the asteroid from another source. "Oooops, Russia/China/India space agency say they saw asteroid XYZ, why didn't we?" Or some math/cosmological models say there are X asteroids floating, but they can only really observe X - 18% (which is a huge margin of error)