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

From: MexicoDoug <*mexicodoug_at_meteoritecentral.com*> Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:01:27 -0400 Message-ID: <8CE1ABFDE46A92A-4E18-4660C_at_webmail-d182.sysops.aol.com> · mexicodoug_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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