NASA's New Asteroid Sentry Stands Watch

NASA announced this week a new Web-based asteroid monitoring system, called Sentry, to monitor and assess the threat of space rocks that could possibly strike the Earth.

The setup is designed to help scientists better communicate with each other about the discoveries of new, potentially threatening asteroids and the follow-up observations that typically show those asteroids to be, in fact, no threat.

The Sentry system

The new Sentry system, developed over the past two years, is partly a response to this perceived need. It is operated out of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The system's online "Risks Page" included 37 asteroids as of Thursday morning.

"Objects normally appear on the Risks Page because their orbits can bring them close to the Earth's orbit and the limited number of available observations do not yet allow their trajectories to be well-enough defined," said JPL's Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, which oversees Sentry.

"By far the most likely outcome is that the object will eventually be removed as new observations become available, the object's orbit is improved, and its future motion is more tightly constrained," Yeomans said in a statement.

He added that several asteroids will be added to the list each month, only to be removed to another "no-risk" page soon afterward.

For more information, point your Internet browser here:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/asteroid_sentry_020314.html