FACT: “There are more than half a million known asteroids in the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and several thousand known near-Earth objects of various sizes in the Earth’s neighborhood. These numbers are rapidly growing as more and more of them are discovered. Currently, more than three thousand asteroids a month are being discovered and dozens of these monthly discoveries are in the near-Earth object population.”
Near-Earth Objects:
Finding Them Before They Find Us
by Donald K. Yeomans
Of all the natural disasters that could befall us, only an Earth impact by a large comet or asteroid has the potential to end civilization in a single blow. Yet these near-Earth objects also offer tantalizing clues to our solar system’s origins, and someday could even serve as stepping-stones for space exploration. In this book, Donald Yeomans introduces readers to the science of near-Earth objects–its history, applications, and ongoing quest to find near-Earth objects before they find us.
We invite you to read chapter one:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s9817.pdf
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