Thursday, July 28, 2011

NASA Wise NEOWISE: Earth Trojan asteroid

This artist's concept provided by NASA illustrates the first known Earth Trojan asteroid, discovered by NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of NASA's WISE mission.

The asteroid is shown in grey and its extreme orbit is shown in green. Earth's orbit around the sun is indicated by blue dots.

The objects are not drawn to scale. The asteroid's orbit is well defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometres).

Picture: AP/NASA - Paul Wiegert

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