Visual Map of New Asteroids
For anyone interested in the asteroid belt or space exploration, this MUST SEE video offers a viewpoint of the last thirty years of our discovery of new asteroids. The text below the video is helpful. Asteroid Discovery From 1980 – 2010 – [youtube.com] View of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids [...]
Neptune’s “Trojan” Asteroids
Some asteroids that share the orbit of a larger body, such as a planet, without interfering with it, are known as “Trojans”. Lagrange points are orbital positions found near two objects, that allow a third object to remain in a balanced and stable position. There are two clusters of asteroids that have accumulated near Lagrange [...]
Landing on an Asteroid
There are some problems with a mission to “land” on an asteroid: Space shuttle not available – the space shuttle is due for retirement and even if it could be pulled out of mothballs, it is unlikely that it would be capable of making an asteroid rendezvous. The shuttle was designed for orbital missions and [...]
Rock Distribution
Building Planets – [nasa.gov] A beautiful artistic illustration of an asteroid belt (link above) shows a common misconception of asteroid spacing that is prevalent in both science fiction and the public mind. We love to watch Hans Solo or some other pilot skilfully guide a spaceship through the clutter of an asteroid field. But in [...]
Asteroid Ice
Astronomers have detected the spectrum signature of ice on an asteroid called 24 Themis in the main belt. They believe the thin coating of frost on the 200 kilometer wide rock is constantly being evaporated by the Sun and then replenished from an interior supply deep inside the rock. Astronomers Find Water On Asteroid’s Surface [...]
Dawn Update
Dawn is a space probe that was launched in Sept of 2007 and has been thrusting it’s way toward the asteroid belt since then. It reached the edge of the main belt last November and now is poised to do some close up investigating of some of the larger asteroids. Dawn Sailing Smoothly Through The [...]
WISE Finds New Asteroids
New Spacecraft Discovers Dozens of Asteroids … Every Day – [space.com] Dozens of asteroids that have been lurking undetected in our solar system are being discovered every day by NASA’s newest space telescope, scientists say. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope was designed to search for “dark” objects in space, such as brown dwarf [...]
21 Lutetia
21 Lutetia is a main belt asteroid, about 100 kilometers in diameter and classified spectrally as M-type or metallic. Rosetta is a space probe that will fly by 21 Lutetia in July of 2010. Rosetta was launched in 2004 and is on a mission to investigate a comet in 2014. On the way to that [...]
Antarctic Asteroid Crater
It is possible that one of the largest asteroid impacts in the history of the Earth has been located in Antarctica. A land mass concentration detected by satellite mapping of the gravitational field suggests a crater that is around 500 km in diameter (300 miles) and was probably created about 250 million years ago. It [...]
Asteroid Collision
It is possible (but not yet confirmed) that astronomers have observed a collision in the asteroid belt for the first time. Mystery Object Behaves Both Like a Comet and Asteroid – [discovery.com] Something awfully curious is happening 250 million miles away in the asteroid belt. Astronomers think they may be witnessing a never-before-seen collision between [...]
