Russian meteor traced to Apollo asteroid family

We didn't see it coming, but the meteor that recently exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, made one of the most recorded entries in space rock history. Now, using the bounty of footage, mostly from cameras on car dashboards, astronomers have reconstructed the object's orbit and traced it back to its home turf.

The rock came from the Apollo family of near-Earth asteroids, say Jorge Zuluaga and Ignacio Ferrin at the University of Antioquia in Colombia (arxiv.org/abs/1302.5377). This family follows an elongated orbit that occasionally crosses Earth's path.

Tracing orbits can show where to check to see if more asteroids are on the way, but normally it takes more time to do so accurately and there aren't always enough current sightings to work out an orbit. "This was a very special case," says Zuluaga.

Deflecting Didymos

Astronomers have the same problem when trying to deduce the orbit of an asteroid that is still in space, to work out if it poses a future threat. So a crowdsourcing website run by the Spanish National Institute of Aerospace Technology is being used to check archives for old snaps of asteroids, which can help fill in the gaps. More than 3000 users working since 2011 have improved orbital calculations for about 500 known objects, the researchers now report (arxiv.org/abs/1302.5375).

The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has announced plans to intercept a harmless Apollo asteroid called Didymos in 2022. If that works, the technique could also deflect an Earth-bound asteroid in future.

Other efforts focus on improving efforts to spot dangerous asteroids in the first place. Yesterday, a rocket launched from Shriharikota, India, carrying, among other things, the Canadian space agency's suitcase-sized asteroid-spotter NEOSSat. Short for Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, it will watch out for incoming rocks currently missed by telescopes on Earth.

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