Asteroid Day
I follow NASA Hubble on Instagram and this was today's post for Asteroid Day, showing their streaks across galaxy cluster Abell 370.
This day was designed to educate the public about asteroids and the importance of defending our planet against them.
The Jet Propulsion Lab at the California Institute of Technology has put together some online sources to help explain how they track and study asteroids.
NASA has sent several spacecraft to study these, such as the Dawn mission in 2007, which explored the two largest objects in the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres.
In 2016, they launched OSIRIS-REx to check out Bennu. It landed in 2018 and is expected back on Earth in 2023 with samples to evaluate. Here is the last image it took as it left earlier this year.
Out of 730,000 known asteroids about 16,000 are considered near-Earth objects, and these are closely monitored. The Center for Near Earth Object Studies compiles data acquired by telescopes and submitted to the Minor Planet Center to update orbit calculations and analyze impact risks.
NEOWISE harvests measurements of asteroids and comets from images collected by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer launched in 2009. After a brief hibernation, it was reactivated in 2013. As of mid-May this year, it has over 1.1 million infrared measurements of 38,958 different solar system objects.
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