🚀 Heads up, Earthlings! Chinese and Ukrainian astronomers have teamed up to protect our planet from potential asteroid impacts. 🌍✨
A collaborative research team from the Chinese mainland's Shanghai Astronomical Observatory (SHAO) and Ukraine's Mykolaiv Astronomical Observatory has been keeping a close eye on near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). Their mission? To get accurate positions and precise orbits of these space rocks zooming close to our home.
NEAs are asteroids that swing by dangerously close to Earth. 😱 The chance of one impacting us is a serious threat, so it's super important to track these celestial bodies ASAP and figure out their orbital paths.
But here's the challenge: observing fast-moving asteroids over longer times can cause blurry, streaked images, making it harder to measure their positions accurately. 📸💫
No worries! The smart cookies at SHAO and Mykolaiv came up with a cool new method called the rotating-drift-scan (RDS) CCD technique. This nifty trick lets them capture clear, point-source images of asteroids even with long exposure times. How awesome is that? 🤩
Using this technique, they gathered over 11,000 positional measurements of nearly 500 NEAs from 2011 to 2023, using two 50cm telescopes located in Xi'an, China, and Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Talk about teamwork! 🤝
Their innovative approach means that even small telescopes around the world can join in the effort to monitor NEAs, making Earth's defense system against asteroid impacts even stronger. 🛡️✨
This groundbreaking work was recently published in the Astronomical Journal. The sky's the limit when we collaborate across borders! 🌌🌠
Reference(s):
China, Ukraine astronomers develop new tech to mitigate asteroid risks
cgtn.com
