Do These Look Like Asteroids?

Asteroids?

Actually, the cover photo may look like a organized group of alien spaceships, but if you read just a bit of the below article, you will see that this is in fact a single asteroid in time lapse photography to show its track.  Hence the title of the NASA article.

But on a recent Facebook post I made a while ago, several didn’t seem to believe that.  So I decided to post it here for a bit more clarity, hopefully.

This class of asteroids are interesting as they were the result of a collision in the outer regions of the asteroid belt.  It is believed because of interactions with Saturn’s gravity they are pushed into our sphere of concern and become classified as near Earth objects.  I think we all know why those particular objects are important to us.  (Think extinction of the dinosaurs here).

As an example, here’s an asteroid that came within about 3 times the distance between the Earth and our moon.  That may sound like it’s a way off, but most reports are 19 times, 26 times, etc that distance and we are still interested in them.  For the photo below, this asteroid even has a moon!

So regardless how close or how far they are away from Earth (today), I think they are worthy of watching.

I think you’ll find this article a very interesting read and certainly worth a share to your mates …

Tracking A Mysterious Group of Asteroid Outcasts

3 Aug 2015
(Source: NASA / JPL)

 

High above the plane of our solar system, near the asteroid-rich abyss between Mars and Jupiter, scientists have found a unique family of space rocks. These interplanetary oddballs are the Euphrosyne (pronounced you-FROH-seh-nee) asteroids, and by any measure they have been distant, dark and mysterious — until now.

Distributed at the outer edge of the asteroid belt, the Euphrosynes have an unusual orbital path that juts well above the ecliptic, the equator of the solar system. The asteroid after which they are named, Euphrosyne — for an ancient Greek goddess of mirth — is about 156 miles (260 kilometers) across and is one of the 10 largest asteroids in the main belt. Current-day Euphrosyne is thought to be a remnant of a massive collision about 700 million years ago that formed the family of smaller asteroids bearing its name. Scientists think this event was one of the last great collisions in the solar system.

A new study conducted by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, used the agency’s orbiting Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope to look at these unusual asteroids to learn more about Near Earth Objects, or NEOs, and their potential threat to Earth.

…… As a result of their study, the JPL researchers believe the Euphrosynes may be the source of some of the dark NEOs found to be on long, highly inclined orbits. They found that, through gravitational interactions with Saturn, Euphrosyne asteroids can evolve into NEOs over timescales of millions of years.

…… “The Euphrosynes have a gentle resonance with the orbit of Saturn that slowly moves these objects, eventually turning some of them into NEOs,” said Joseph Masiero, JPL’s lead scientist on the Euphrosynes study. “This particular gravitational resonance tends to push some of the larger fragments of the Euphrosyne family into near-Earth space.”….. The 1,400 Euphrosyne asteroids studied by Masiero and his colleagues turned out to be large and dark, with highly inclined and elliptical orbits. These traits make them good candidates for the source of some of the dark NEOs the NEOWISE telescope detects and discovers, particularly those that also have highly inclined orbits.

…… “Most near-Earth objects come from a number of sources in the inner region of the main belt, and they are quickly mixed around,” Masiero said. “But with objects coming from this family, in such a unique region, we are able to draw a likely path for some of the unusual, dark NEOs we find back to the collision in which they were born.”A better understanding of the origins and behaviors of these mysterious objects will give researchers a clearer picture of asteroids in general, and in particular the NEOs that skirt our home planet’s neighborhood. Such studies are important, and potentially critical, to the future of humanity, which is a primary reason JPL and its partners continue to relentlessly track these wanderers within our solar system. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of the known NEOs.

Cover Photo: The asteroid Euphrosyne glides across a field of background stars in this time-lapse view from NASA’s WISE spacecraft. WISE obtained the images used to create this view over a period of about a day around May 17, 2010, during which it observed the asteroid four times. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Article Source: NASA/JPL