Asteroid Discovery From 1980 - 2010
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Video Created by Scott Manley, this is a view of the solar system showing the locations of all the asteroids starting in 1980, as asteroids are discovered they are added to the map and highlighted white so you can pick out the new ones. The final colour of an asteroids indicates how closely it comes to the inner solar system. Earth Crossers are Red Earth Approachers (Perihelion less than 1.3AU) are Yellow All Others are Green Notice now the pattern of discovery follows the Earth around its orbit, most discoveries are made in the region directly opposite the Sun. You'll also notice some clusters of discoveries on the line between Earth and Jupiter, these are the result of surveys looking for Jovian moons. Similar clusters of discoveries can be tied to the other outer planets, but those are not visible in this video. As the video moves into the mid 1990's we see much higher discovery rates as automated sky scanning systems come online. Most of the surveys are imaging the sky directly opposite the sun and you'll see a region of high discovery rates aligned in this manner. At the beginning of 2010 a new discovery pattern becomes evident, with discovery zones in a line perpendicular to the Sun-Earth vector. These new observations are the result of the WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) which is a space mission that's tasked with imaging the entire sky in infrared wavelengths. The scale of the video at 1080P resolution is roughly 1million kilometers per pixel, and each second of video corresponds to 60 days. Currently we have observed over half a million minor planets, and the discovery rates show no sign that we're running out of undiscovered objects, scientific estimates suggest that there are about a billion asteroids larger than 100metres (about the size of a football field) . Orbital elements were taken from the 'astorb.dat' data created by Ted Bowell and associates at ftp://ftp.lowell.edu/pub/elgb/astorb.html Music is 'Transgenic' by Trifonic: http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Trifonic/dp/B0013MTJUQ/ - they're awesome guys, give them some love. Check out todays asteroid map at http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html Quite a few journalists, bloggers and tweeters are attributing this to NASA or Arecibo Observatory - while they do fine work they had nothing to do with this. If you write a story you can credit it to Scott Manley. If you are needing a higher quality video or images for a specific purposes - education, news or just eye candy I can supply them on a case by case basis. Thanks for the Interest! 1000 comments Over a thousand tweets http://topsy.com/trackback?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DS_d-gs0WoUw
Comments
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How long do we have to observe an asteroid before knowing its orbit?
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From this it looks like a LOT of asteroids have crashed on the earth in just 30 years. But we aren't dead yet so what gives?
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Look at all the asteroids following Jupiter! And also how much of the belt's ones tend to gravitate towards Jupiter and then fall back in the belt.
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Wow! I could not help but notice the dramatic increase in rate of detection around 1998. Perhaps Windows 98 was not so bad after all? ;-)
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What are those red dotz?
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I would like to point out the red ones are what we call near Earth. the ones that are most likely to hit us.Ya they still want to go to Mars.Also note these are just the asteroids not the comets. Maybe I can get E.P.Grodine to talk about it sometime with Scott.Ed was a liaison between Russia and the USA. and also discover the China man space program. He was involved in NASA. with this very subject.
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So, did the Phaeton planet exist?
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Notice how the discoveries are near to where Earth is.
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if all those rocks formed together, we would have a new planet.... not sure how it would fair against Jupiter's gravity but it would be awesome
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That's it.. Im building a bomb shelter...Deep!
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Soo basically we are fucked up, if we want to leave Sol?
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Really puts Jupiter's importance into perspective
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How do they keep them distinct from one another? I feel like they must be discovering the same asteroid multiple times
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This video introduced me to Triphonic, which has become one of my favorite bands ever. Got me through a lot of homework and late nights of study.
Also, the video is freakin sweet! Props to the manly Scottsman. -
I m pretty sure the reason we don't confuse asteroids with one another is because this is on the scale of the solar system, which is unimaginably immense. They are all incredibly far apart, in reality.
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This time I tried to watch the same asteroid the entire time. I finally lost track of it sometime in 1999.
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That part in the end when you grabbed the upgrade that made your ship shoot sideways was really cool. You should do that early on and try going for the high-score.
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how do we know we're not seeing the same ones over and over again , how can they make sure it's a new one?
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I don't know why but this really freaks me out
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thanks for this info
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