[meteorite-list] NASA's Wise Mission Finds First Trojan Asteroid Sharing Earth's Orbit

From: Richard Kowalski <*damoclid_at_meteoritecentral.com*> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:36:42 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <1311802602.58130.YahooMailNeo_at_web113612.mail.gq1.yahoo.com> · damoclid_at_meteoritecentral.com

--
Richard Kowalski
Full Moon Photography
IMCA #1081
----- Original Message -----
> From: Ron Baalke <baalke at zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>
> To: Meteorite Mailing List <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2011 2:27 PM
> Subject: [meteorite-list] NASA's Wise Mission Finds First Trojan Asteroid Sharing Earth's Orbit
> 
> 
> 
> July 27, 2011
> 
> Trent J. Perrotto 
> Headquarters, Washington? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 
> 202-358-0321 
> trent.j.perrotto at nasa.gov 
> 
> Whitney Clavin 
> Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 
> 818-354-4673 
> whitney.clavin at jpl.nasa.gov 
> RELEASE: 11-247
> 
> NASA'S WISE MISSION FINDS FIRST TROJAN ASTEROID SHARING EARTH'S ORBIT
> 
> WASHINGTON -- Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's 
> Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered 
> the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth. 
> 
> Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable 
> points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead 
> or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide 
> with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, 
> Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans. 
> 
> Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been 
> difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near 
> the sun from Earth's point of view. 
> 
> "These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard 
> to see," said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead 
> author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the 
> journal Nature. "But we finally found one, because the object has an 
> unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is 
> typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of 
> view difficult to have at Earth's surface." 
> 
> The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from 
> January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their 
> search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to 
> the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, 
> such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 
> million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun. 
> The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main 
> belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 
> 132 that were previously unknown. 
> 
> The team's hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 
> was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with 
> the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. 
> 
> The asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter. It has an 
> unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the 
> plane of Earth's orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and 
> below the plane. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million 
> kilometers) from Earth. The asteroid's orbit is well-defined and for 
> at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 
> million miles (24 million kilometers). An animation showing the orbit 
> is available at: 
> 
> http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=103550791 
> 
> "It's as though Earth is playing follow the leader," said Amy 
> Mainzer, 
> the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion 
> Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "Earth always is chasing this 
> asteroid around." 
> 
> A handful of other asteroids also have orbits similar to Earth. Such 
> objects could make excellent candidates for future robotic or human 
> exploration. Asteroid 2010 TK7 is not a good target because it 
> travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which 
> would require large amounts of fuel to reach it. 
> 
> "This observation illustrates why NASA's NEO Observation program 
> funded the mission enhancement to process data collected by WISE," 
> said Lindley Johnson, NEOWISE program executive at NASA Headquarters 
> in Washington. "We believed there was great potential to find objects 
> in near-Earth space that had not been seen before." 
> 
> NEOWISE data on orbits from the hundreds of thousands of asteroids and 
> comets it observed are available through the NASA-funded 
> International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at the 
> Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass. 
> JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate 
> in Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is a 
> professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. The mission 
> was selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which is managed by the 
> agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science 
> instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. 
> 
> The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., 
> Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at 
> the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California 
> Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. 
> 
> For more WISE information visit: 
> 
> http://www.nasa.gov/wise 
> ??? 
> -end-
> 
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