NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft discovered and characterized 40 near-Earth objects (NEOs) in the first year after the mission was re-started in December 2013. Eight of the discoveries have been classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs), based on their size and how close their orbits could come to Earth’s orbit.
PSI Senior Scientist Tommy Grav is involved in day-to-day operations of the mission and is part of the team that runs the software to extract and analyze the detections of the moving objects in the images.
“NEOWISE continues to be a work-horse for detecting asteroids and comets, providing data on more than 10,000 objects over the last year,” Grav said. “These data is key in better understanding the physical and dynamical properties of the small bodies in our solar system, especially the Near-Earth asteroid population.”
The mission has further observed and characterized 245 previously known near-Earth objects. From December 2013 to December 2014, NEOWISE discovered three new comets and observed 32 others. One of the others has turned into the brightest comet in Earth’s night sky in early 2015, comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy).
Above, this movie shows the progression of NASA’s NEOWISE survey in the mission’s first year following its restart in December 2013. Each dot represents an asteroid or comet that the mission observed. Green circles represent near-Earth objects (asteroids and comets that come within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun; one astronomical unit is Earth’s distance from the sun). Yellow squares represent comets. Gray dots represent all other asteroids, which are mostly in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are shown.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
