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What If You Could See Asteroids In the Night Sky?

Posted by timothy on from the hard-rain dept.

An anonymous reader writes: As part of Asteroid Day a 360-degree video rendering the night sky with the population of near-earth asteroids included has been created by 'Astronogamer' Scott Manley. The video shows how the Earth flies through a cloud of asteroids on its journey around the sun, and yet we've only discovered about 1% of the near earth asteroid population.

3 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do we know we've only discovered 1% of NEAs by rubycodez · · Score: 3, Informative

    data from impact areas on moon, discovery rate, increase in counts with improvement in instruments are some factors:

    http://www.lsst.org/lsst/publi...

  2. while video is great it is biased by SergeyKurdakov6434 · · Score: 3, Informative

    First, Scott does not mention, that most dangerous asteroids are found

    >95% of 1 km size asteroids
    >90% for 500 m size asteroids
    ~60-70% 300 m size asteroids

    so yes, we know 1% of asteroids, but still - the danger now for a person to be killed by asteroid is more than 100 times less, than it was two decades ago

    another problem with his video, that he omits to mention, that inner asteroids are either harmless, or if they intersect earth orbit - they could be tracked at dusk/dawn ( just like venus is visible - and venus is quite far from being able to hit earth, so closer asteroids and relatively big asteroids are easier to find )

    then about finding inner asteroids with space crafts - it is not just B612 foundation, which deals with that , but there are other proposals

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.0794... - which is really cheap ( though idea requires some more development )
    or http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1501.0... neocam - the paper has a proof that it is somewhat more realistic than B612 proposal and is not less efficient.

  3. Re:See with what equipment by thrich81 · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is one asteroid, Vesta, which can be seen every couple of years or so by people with decent (not exceptional) naked eye eyesight. I've seen it a few times, you just need to know exactly where to look and a have a bit of stargazing experience at picking out faint objects. Its last opposition was in April 2014. Without looking it up I'd guess the next is in late 2015 or early 2016.