JAKARTA – European Space Agency (ESA) discovered more than 30,000 asteroids near the Earth. 1,425 of them have the potential to hit the planet.
“The good news is that more than half of the currently known near-Earth asteroids have been discovered in the past six years, demonstrating how much our vision of asteroids has improved,” said Richard Moissl, ESA’s head of planetary defense.
According to the Daily Mail, on Tuesday (10/18/2022), thousands of these asteroids were detected thanks to ESA’s latest advanced telescope, of the 30,039 asteroids detected, it is estimated that there are about 10,000 with a diameter of more than 140 meters.
ESA also mentions that there are 1,000 asteroids larger than 1 kilometer in diameter. Most of them are found in the asteroid belt, the ring-shaped region of the Solar System, which lies roughly between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars.
Today, asteroids make up about one third of the roughly one million asteroids discovered in the Solar System so far. The first near-Earth asteroid discovered was called Eros 433.
This asteroid was first noticed by the German astronomer Carl Gustav Witt at the Berlin Observatory on August 13, 1898, with a strange shape, an elongated and rocky composition.
The orbit of 433 Eros brings it to a distance of about 13.5 million miles from Earth or 57 times the distance of the Moon. In addition to being the first to be discovered, 433 Eros became the first asteroid to be orbited and visited by a spaceship.
The craft, called NEAR Shoemaker, studied Eros from close orbit for a year before landing on its surface in February 2001.
(amj)
