Trojan Asteroid of the Day: NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission has located the first-known “Trojan” asteroid in Earth’s orbit.
A Trojan asteroid shares a planet’s orbit, but stays at a relatively constant distance in front of or behind the planet, and thus never collides with it. Neptune, Mars, Jupiter and two moons of Saturn have Trojans, and scientists suspected the Earth had one as well, but it was undectable until WISE.
“[W]e finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth’s surface,” said Athabasca University’s Martin Connors, lead author on a paper about the newly-discovered asteroid.
[NASA]
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