Friday, March 15, 2013

Orbits of Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This diagram illustrates the differences between orbits of a typical near-Earth asteroid (blue) and a potentially hazardous asteroid, or PHA (orange). PHAs have the closest orbits to Earth's orbit, coming within 5 million miles (about 8 million kilometers), and they are large enough to survive passage through Earth's atmosphere and cause significant damage.

No comments: