WISE Mission finds Earth Trojan Asteroid Asteroid 2010 TK7

NASA has discovered the first Earth Trojan Asteroid called 2010 TK7 which is 1000 feet in Diameter (a Trojan is an asteroid that shares the same orbit around the sun as the Earth). But there is no reason to fear 2010 TK7 sine it is on the same orbit path as the Earth it can never collide with it (barring it being sent off of orbit by an impact with another asteroid).

You can click on the following link to read an article on NASA's tracking of Near Earth Objects (which helped identify earths first Trojan Asteroid 2010 TK7) Earth Trojan Asteroid.

The rest of this article is condensed from information at NASA'a WISE mission web page. You can read al the original information in its entirety at the following link to the NASA WISE mission site: Earth Trojan Asteroid

1. The WISE mission combined with data from NASA's Near Earth Orbit Program made the discovery possible.
2. Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view.
3. Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it.
4. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.."
5. The 2010 TK7 asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter.
6. It has an unusual orbit that traces a complex motion near a stable point in the plane of Earth's orbit, although the asteroid also moves above and below the plane.
7. The object is about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) from Earth.
8. The asteroid's orbit is well-defined and for at least the next 100 years, it will not come closer to Earth than 15 million miles (24 million kilometers)

Earth Trojan Asteroid 2010 TK7 – How they found it

1. The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011.
2. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets.
3. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun.
4. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.
5. The team's hunt resulted in two Trojan candidates. One called 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
6.  An animation showing the orbit is available at: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=103550791 .

"It's as though Earth is playing follow the leader," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NEOWISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Earth always is chasing this asteroid around."

A handful of other asteroids also have orbits similar to Earth. Such objects could make excellent candidates for future robotic or human exploration. Asteroid 2010 TK7 is not a good target because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require large amounts of fuel to reach it.

"This observation illustrates why NASA's NEO Observation program funded the mission enhancement to process data collected by WISE," said Lindley Johnson, NEOWISE program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We believed there was great potential to find objects in near-Earth space that had not been seen before."

NEOWISE data on orbits from the hundreds of thousands of asteroids and comets it observed are available through the NASA-funded International

OK thats it for this Eath Trojan Asteroid |2010 TK7 article

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