NASA’s “NEOWISE” mission achieved its goal: it tracked the movement of an elusive family that avoids its usual orbits in the general Asteroid Belt, preferring crazy roller coasters in open space across the entire equatorial area of the Solar System.
They are considered to be the product of a mass collision of another more fragmented asteroid, called Euphrosinia, which arose about 700 million years ago. The most interesting thing is that this is considered to be the last major blow in the evolution of the Solar System, which left behind a long, 260 km long line of debris moving along a very inclined orbital trajectory.
Euphrosinia is one of the ten largest asteroids that exist between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This family of asteroids is of great interest to astronomers in tracking various space objects (OZS), approaching the Earth through a subtle resonance with the gravity of Saturn. In the future, it is likely that they will come closer to our orbit.
"Euphrosinia has a connection with the orbit of Saturn, which is slowly moving it, rotating around its axis," said Joseph Masiero, a NASA representative and lead scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California. "The picturesque gravitational resonance has a tendency to push Euphrosinia away from larger space objects, directing her toward the Earth." The initial launch was in 2009 to scan the sky with an infrared beam, then in “The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (or WISE) was dismissed after he ran out of coolant. Now WISE has been restarted and sent back to space to search for the OZS in a mission called “NEOwise.” It simply turned out that the spacecraft revival was the ideal solution for finding dark, highly inclined asteroids, such as Euphrosynia.
The Masciero team tracked and explored 1,400 asteroids from Euphrosyne with WISE, given that they were large, dark and strongly deviated from their elliptical orbits. More than 700,000 objects from the asteroid belt are already known, but this number is not even half of the total number. Many are small, poorly visible even with a telescope, which makes them more difficult to detect. NEOwise, however, specializes precisely in the search for these asteroids, determining their approximate location when possible approaching Earth. The almost impossible task of searching for OZS in a mixed belt of various space objects became feasible.
"Most objects in Earth's orbit around the Earth come precisely from a common belt and quickly mix with each other," said Mashiero. "But with Euphrosinia in such a unique region, we can predict the likely path for some NEOs to determine the place of the collision in which they were born."
