NASA asteroid hunter Amy Mainzer talks about how they hope to find potentially hazardous space rocks.
Twenty one years ago, NASA set out the goal of finding 90 percent of the asteroids and comets near Earth that were bigger than 3,200 feet in diameter. This was extended seven years later to include objects over 460 feet.
We were reminded of the potential danger space rocks pose in 2013, when a 66 foot meteor crashed into Chelyabinsk, Russia. It landed in a lake in a remote region, so damage was fairly minimal—but had it impacted on a town or city, the consequences could have been devastating. In an interview with Newsweek, Mainzer discusses her work with NASA and how NEOCam could lead to the detection of hundreds of thousands of NEOs in the future.
How did the team come up with NEOWISE and how many asteroids has it been used to find so far?NEOWISE comprises both a set of image processing and database tools developed to search the WISE data for moving objects, and it’s also the name of the restarted WISE mission. When WISE completed its prime mission in early 2011, it was placed into hibernation.
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