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from the it-would-be-wise-to-find-all-NEOs dept.
NASA's NEOWISE mission is continuing to find merciless space rocks:
NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013. Of these, 72 were new discoveries.
[...] Since beginning its survey in December 2013, NEOWISE has measured more than 19,000 asteroids and comets at infrared wavelengths. More than 5.1 million infrared images of the sky were collected in the last year. A new movie, based on the data collected, depicts asteroids and comets observed so far by NEOWISE.
"By studying the distribution of lighter- and darker-colored material, NEOWISE data give us a better understanding of the origins of the NEOs, originating from either different parts of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or the icier comet populations," said James Bauer, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:40AM
Planet's wander in the sky amongst the stars. I have never looked at the sky and seen the Earth wander amongst the stars, have you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @12:49PM
Because the Earth is spinning and we're spinning with it, we can't see the "wandering" directly, but it's been measured. Mostly, the Earth just goes in ellipses, almost circles, about the nearest star. A long time ago, some people took a picture of the Earth [wikipedia.org] from a distance, but you can't see any stars at all in that picture. It looks like there's one star, but that one is the Earth.