NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed a population of small asteroids in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, smaller than ever detected before. The 138 new asteroids, ranging in size from a bus to a stadium, provide insights into asteroid formation, collisions, and their potential drift towards Earth.
NASA ’s James Webb Space Telescope now includes asteroids on its list of objects studied and secrets revealed.
The 138 new asteroids range from the size of a bus to the size of a stadium – a size range in the main belt that has not been observable with ground-based telescopes. Knowing how many main belt asteroids are in different size ranges can tell us something about how asteroids have been changed over time by collisions. That process is related to how some of them have escaped the main belt over the solar system’s history, and even how meteorites end up on Earth.
presenting the results. “Asteroids this size likely formed from collisions between larger ones in the main belt and are likely to drift towards the vicinity of Earth and the Sun.”ATAP works across disciplines to support NASA’sby studying what would happen in the case of an Earth impact and modeling the associated risks.
The team that made the asteroid detections, led by research scientist Artem Burdanov and professor of planetary science Julien de Wit, both of MIT, developed a method to analyze existing Webb images for the presence of asteroids that may have been inadvertently “caught on film” as they passed in front of the telescope.
Space Telescope Asteroids Main Asteroid Belt Planetary Defense NASA
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