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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.

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  1. How do we know we've only discovered 1% of NEAs? by sjbe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    Ok, how do we know what we haven't discovered yet? I know statistical techniques for estimating population sizes of wildlife. (Catch some number, tag and release, catch a bunch more and see how many tagged ones you catch which gives you a population estimate) I'm not sure those techniques are applicable here. Anybody have any idea how this estimate was arrived at or is it taken straight out of someone's derriere? Measurements of orbit perturbations? Something else?