| Title | NASA's NEOWISE Mission Finds 72 Additional Near-Earth Objects | |
| Date | Friday April 08 2016, @10:07PM | |
| Author | CoolHand | |
| Topic | ||
| 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.
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printed from SoylentNews, NASA's NEOWISE Mission Finds 72 Additional Near-Earth Objects on 2024-04-19 11:56:57