New Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Count
Hey Space Placers! NASA has just released a new Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) survey that has resulted in a higher number of PHA's than was previously thought. PHA's are asteroids that have the potential to pose a threat to our planet due to how close they will come tour home world. As stated by NASA in its press release: Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids. Also known as "PHAs," these asteroids have orbits that come within five million miles (about eight million kilometers) of Earth, and they are big enough to survive passing through Earth's atmosphere and cause damage on a regional, or greater, scale. The asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission, called NEOWISE, sampled 107 PHAs to make predictions about the population as a whole. Findings indicate there are roughly 4,700 PHAs, plus or minus 1,500, with ...