Photo Gallery Germany Versus the Asteroids
A computer simulation of the completed "AsteroidFinder" satellite in orbit. Planning for the satellite, which scientists hope will someday serve as an early warning system for asteroids that could strike Earth, is currently taking shape in the German city of Bremen.
An artist's interpretation of the impact of the off-course asteroid that hit Mexico around 65 million years ago near the town of Chicxulub. Many scientists believe it is implicated in the extinction of the dinosaurs. Will a strike this big happen again? Maybe. But most scientists agree it won't happen suddenly.
DPA/ Don Davis
A diagram of AsteroidFinder. In Bremen, some scientists describe the satellite as a house made of beer crates -- mainly because the elements that make up the satellite can simply be stacked together as though they were beer crates.
A computer model of what are known as "Inner Earth Objects." By simply looking at standard distribution statistics, researchers suspect that there are around a thousand such objects inside Earth's orbit, each of them at least 100 meters in size. Yet they only have actual knowledge of 10 of these sorts of giant space rocks.
An artist's illustration of a massive asteroid belt in orbit around a star the same age and size as our sun. Before the German project, it was American space research that was most occupied with the search for asteroids. But the Americans only ever looked at asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and a lack of funding has often limited more ambitious projects. The Germans want to search much closer to home.
A picture from the Hubble space telescope shows a comet-like object that astronomers believe was created by the collision of two asteroids.
Another image from the Hubble telescope. In terms of the German AsteroidFinder, fast shutter speeds should help ensure that the pictures are not as out of focus as some jittery holiday snapshot. Which is why the flying scout is counting on many single photographs to make up the celestial overview. Every day "AsteroidFinder" should send around 14 gigabytes of data back to earth at the DLR station in Neutrelitz.
