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To: Scrapps who wrote (16548)	7/3/1998 10:13:00 PM
From: Scrapps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22053

Newly found asteroid points to unseen danger By Maggie Fox WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers said they had found an asteroid in a place where they have never been found before, orbiting entirely between the Earth and the sun, and warned there may be more out there. They say this asteroid is nothing to worry about -- it does not seem to be on a collision course with the Earth. But because it was so hard to spot, there could be others in orbit that no one would see until the last minute. Astronomy professor David Tholen of the University of Hawaii and graduate student Robert Whiteley used a special camera to spot the asteroid. Most asteroids orbit in an ellipse that extends at least partly outside the Earth's orbit. That means there is a point in the orbit during which the asteroid can be easily spotted against the darkness of space. But this new asteroid, dubbed 1998 DK36, always has the sun somewhere in the background from the Earth's perspective. So it is hard to see. Tholen said there could be others like it, coming out of the sun -- and no one had been looking out for them. "1998 DK36 is nothing to lose sleep over. It's the ones we haven't found yet that are of concern," Tholen said in a statement. "All other efforts to discover asteroids on a collision course with the Earth are being directed at a region of the sky almost opposite the sun," he added. "The significance of this discovery is that we would have otherwise never found this new asteroid because it apparently doesn't travel to that region of the sky being scanned by other search efforts." If an asteroid's orbit intersects with the Earth's at some point, there is the possibility of a collision. If it comes from a direction that astronomers are looking at, there will be plenty of warning. But that may not be the case, says Tholen, in the case of an asteroid coming from within the Earth's orbit. The sun's blinding light would make the asteroid virtually invisible. Tholen and Whiteley used a specialized camera fitted on the University of Hawaii's 2.24-meter telescope on top of Mauna Kea last February. They were scanning the skies at dawn and dusk-looking for asteroids that might be inside the earth's orbit. They found one. They said it appears to be very close to, but slightly inside the orbit of the Earth. They calculate it is about 130 feet (40 meters) in diameter. That's about the size of the asteroid believed to have flattened trees for hundreds of square miles in the Tunguska region of Siberia in June of 1908, when it exploded in the atmosphere with the force of a nuclear bomb. It's also about the size of the meteorite that blasted out the 4,000-foot-wide Meteor Crater in Arizona 50,000 years ago. But Tholen doubts this asteroid will hit Earth. "We were unable to obtain enough observations to perform a formal probability calculation, though the best-fitting orbit has the object passing an apparently safe 750,000 miles (1.2 million km) from the Earth's orbit," he said. "To do a better job with such discoveries, we really need to have a telescope that we can dedicate to such difficult observations." It is not entirely clear what scientists would do if an asteroid was indeed found to be on a collision course with the Earth. In March some astronomers at first warned that a newly spotted asteroid might hit the Earth in the year 2028, but closer observation confirmed that it will miss by 600,000 miles (960,000 km). But some experts say with that much warning, a bomb could deflect an asteroid -- if the bomb could be transported to the asteroid.