It’s one thing to read about the discovery history of asteroids; it is another to visualize it. Astronomer Scott Manley has created a fantastic animation illustrating the known positions of all asteroids discovered in the past three decades. Each new discovery appears as a white object and then evolves to either yellow or red for near-Earth-asteroids, or green for all others.
While the animation is not to scale – Space is not so crowded as it appears in the video – it does offer a great comprehension of how frequently we are discovering new objects, especially in the last decade, and of just how busy our inner solar system really is. Hundreds of thousands of asteroids have already been discovered, more than seven-thousand of which pass near or across our own planet’s orbit. Scientists estimate that there are probably millions of undiscovered asteroids residing in the Main Belt, with about 750,000 measuring greater than one kilometer, and hundreds of thousands of which are likely near-Earth asteroids.
The most interesting thing about Manley’s animation is the discovery pattern. As noted in Manley’s You Tube description, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun and many are obviously related to specific missions and surveys, such as the automated sky surveys, the more recent WISE mission, and even past searches for Jovian satellites.
Kudos to Scott Manley for this creative way of bringing the more intricate details of solar system discovery down to Earth!
*Click the full-screen option and turn up your sound.
If you are a fan of NASA’s Space program, you are probably also well aware of NASA’s budget constraints. Good science does not come cheap and this is especially true of Space-related studies, whether they be Earth-based or beyond.
