Arizona professor will lead NASA project to locate menacing objects near Earth tucsonweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tucsonweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Jalpan Nanavati
PHOENIX – NASA has appointed a University of Arizona professor to lead a project to track asteroids that potentially could crash into Earth. The mission involves launching a telescope into a high orbit to locate such near-Earth objects using the infrared radiation they emit.
Amy Mainzer, a professor of planetary sciences, will lead a team building the Near Earth Object Surveyor, an infrared telescope that will track and characterize any asteroids that one day could crash into the planet.
“We want to spot them when they are years to ideally decades away from any potential impact with the Earth,” Mainzer said.
While scientists have managed to recover and examine thousands of meteorites, finding their origin or even whether they are from icy comets or rocky asteroids has proved elusive. Now, for the first time, a team of international researchers has traced the source of a boulder-sized rock that landed in Botswana to an asteroid named Vesta. Boasting a diameter of about 300 miles, it is one of the largest and brightest rocks in the asteroid belt that circles the sun between Jupiter and Mars.
Una roca cayó del segundo asteroide más grande carasycaretas.com.uy - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from carasycaretas.com.uy Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Once upon a time a small asteroid broke off of its parent space rock – and smashed into Earth 23 million years later as. Now, scientists know where it originated - from Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in our solar system.