There is a new tool used by NASA which they describe as intruder alert. It is designed to track asteroids that can possibly hit and damage Earth.
If there a space rock coming Earth's way and large enough to hit our planet, this tool which they named SCOUT is designed to track down the asteroid and calculate its size and the trajectory it follows.
With such a tool, humans can feel safe and protected, knowing we have advance knowledge of celestial bodies that are about to hit us.
SCOUT is a computer program that is now being tested by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. It is an intruder alert system that continuously scans the cosmos to look for objects that are close to our planet.
SCOUT does the scanning through a series of telescopes located in numerous locations, gathering the data from the telescopes that have visual on the asteroid scanned and calculated the estimated size, speed and trajectory of the object.
The scanning by SCOUT and the interconnected telescopes will continue until it is definitely sure the object will not hit our planet. According to astronomer Paul Chodas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an estimated 5 or more potentially dangerous objects are discovered very night.
The objective of SCOUT is to discover these dangerous asteroids a day, two days or a few hours before it hits the earth. It was designed to make the discovery process as fast as it could possibly be.
A rock which passed Earth tonight have been tracked by a few days ago by a NASA telescope in Hawaii and a few hours after, subsequently observed by the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Observatory. SCOUT has calculated that the rock will miss Earth by 300,000 kilometres.
The world feels safe with this intruder alert process watching the skies.
