Kitt Peak National Observatory in southern Arizona. NASA has awarded a grant in the amount of $3.16 million to the University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey for the purpose of continuing to search the nearby solar system for potential Earth threatening asteroids through Apirl 2012 [More from The Arizona Daily Star].
Managed by Dr. Stephen M. Larson of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, the survey has discovered about 70 percent of all NEOs found in past thirty-six months with a tally of 565 NEO discoveries in 2008, which broke its record-setting number of 460 NEO discoveries in 2007 [CNN].
The primary target of the search are Near Earth Objects, about the size of 10 football fields, traveling through space that have come or are predicted to come within 130 million miles of Earths sun, making them a risk to hit Earth.
Spacewatch (also at the University of Arizona and Kitt Peak National Observatory) is also associated with the ongoing detection program started in 1998. NASA has been charged with finding threatening asteroids and some within the space agency have worked on a pro-active defense.
1 comments:
I think that this asteroid is actually that wormwood star in Revelations that John saw when taken into the future by spirit. He either made a mistake thinking it was a star when he saw it burning or he saw some kind of alternative future like in sliders the series.
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