Potentially Hazardous Objects Archives

February 23, 2024February 23, 2024 by Evan Gough

A New Space Telescope will Map the Universe and Help Protect the Earth from Asteroids

This artist's illustration shows NASA's SPHEREx observatory in orbit. The mission will launch in 2025. Image Credit: By NASA/JPL - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=143819030

Can we secure our place in the Solar System? Not in any absolute sense because nature can be very unpredictable. But we can make the effort to safeguard our civilization by cataloguing potentially dangerous asteroids. An upcoming space telescope will help.

December 9, 2021December 9, 2021 by Evan Gough

NASA’s New Asteroid Impact Monitoring System Comes Online

This diagram shows the orbits of 2,200 potentially hazardous objects as calculated by JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). Highlighted is the orbit of the double asteroid Didymos, the target of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

An asteroid striking Earth is a genuine possibility. There are tens of thousands of asteroids classified as Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs), and we’re finding around 3,000 more each year. The number of new detections will see an uptick in the next few years as better survey telescopes come online.

Now NASA has developed a new system to classify all those asteroids and better evaluate impact probabilities.