Thfire.com Everyday news that matters Trojan Asteroid : Trojan Asteroid, is a general name given to a Asteroid that circulates the Sun in the same Orbit as a Planet.
Such type of Asteroid were earlier detected only in Mars, Jupiter and Neptune orbit. This discovery made the Scientist scratch their head because of their failure to learn such asteriod orbits.
As a result, they increased their efforts to determine whether our Earth has one. In the end, they have found such Trojan Asteroid existence in our Planet’s orbit.
Whow! that sounds scary. Imagine an asteriod circling the sun with the same orbit of Earth with some gravitational distance between them.
2010 TK7, as it is known, was found by Nasa’s Wise telescope. The discovery is reported in this week’s Nature journal. 2010 TK7 is probably not the rock of choice, simply because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth’s orbit, which would require a lot of fuel to reach it.
Nonetheless, its detection means it is highly likely there are other, more suitable Trojans out there waiting to be found.
Wise, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer launched in 2009, examined more than 500 Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), 123 of which were new to science.
The authors of the Nature paper sifted through data on these rocks, looking for the candidates that might be Trojans.
Follow-up work on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope confirmed the status of 2010 TK7. It traces quite a complex path at its orbital point.
How far is the Trojan Asteroid from Earth?
Currently, it is about 80 million km from Earth, and should come no closer than about 25 million km.
The team says its orbit appears stable at least for the next 10,000 years.
The difficulty is the viewing geometry that puts any Trojan, from the perspective of an Earth-based telescope, in bright skies.
