Thursday, June 8, 2017

Where the 'roids are


Not steroids, silly.  Asteroids.  Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), specifically.

When the WISE mission ran out of cryogenic coolant, NASA retooled the spacecraft and retasked the mission to look for new asteroids, specifically NEOs.  Hence, NEOWISE was born.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory has just released a video of what NEOWISE has found.

Three years of NEOWISE asteroid data

Since it started looking for them, NEOWISE has found 114 new NEOs.

Does that keep you up at night?  It doesn't really keep me up at night, but I still wonder if there's one that will find its way to Earth.

There sure are a lot of them.




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