(ORDO NEWS) — According to NASA scientists, destructive asteroids can “sneak up” to the Earth completely unnoticed.
Astronomers have discovered that asteroids plowing through outer space can appear to be stationary, prompting scientists to make new efforts to solve the problem of Earth’s safety.
As part of the fight against the asteroid threat, NASA sent a heavy spacecraft into space in 2021 to ram the comet and knock it off course.
When asteroids rush towards the Earth from the region of the eastern sky at about 2 am, then, relative to the rotating Earth, objects moving in space may appear to be stationary.
From certain angles and at certain times of the night, asteroids can appear to be frozen in place.
A study published in the journal Icarus says that 50% of impacting cosmic bodies approaching Earth from the east usually go through periods of slow motion, making them difficult to detect.
NASA scientists write that “when surveying the sky in this direction, special care should be taken and aggressively tracking new slow-moving objects.”
Professor Wainscout, who led the research team at the University of Hawaii, said tracking algorithms needed to be updated to address the problem of “stalking” asteroids.
Wainscout said that about 40% of large asteroids approaching Earth are now catalogued. At the same time, he admitted that scientists still have a lot to do in order to catalog more than 90% of space bodies.
In this case, the number of objects “stalking” to the Earth may not be so large.
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