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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.

1 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do we know we've only discovered 1% of NEAs by aaron4801 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If it's just a count of objects, "1%" doesn't mean much anyway. We should be much more interested in mapping Mass. A 1kg asteroid is mostly harmless (to Earth, though it could be catastrophic for man-made satellites). This may be a faulty assumption, but I would think the larger, more dangerous objects would be detected first. If so, 1% of the total number may represent something like 50% of the total mass of all NEAs. If that's true, it's far less ominous than saying "99% of potential Earth-impacting asteroids are currently hidden!!!1!"