Trojan horse?
Earth's “Trojan” asteroid
2010 TK7 traces a complex path at its orbital point, moving above and below the plane of the Earth's orbit
Recently, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), mission has detected orbiting the Sun in loops around the plane of Earth's orbit. Before getting into details, let's explain what Trojan is in the realms of astronomy. A Trojan is a minor planet or natural satellite (moon) that shares an orbit with a larger planet or moon, but does not collide with it because it constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet. Prior to this latest discovery, it was known that within our own solar systems, Saturn has the most known Trojan satellites: Saturn's moon Tethys has two Trojan moons (Telesto and Calypso), and Dione also has two Trojan moons (Helene and Polydeuces). In the scientific community, it was a long-held belief that Earth should have Trojans however their discovery was a sternly challenging one since they are relatively small and appear close to the Sun from Earth's point of view. According to Martin Connors of Athabasca University, Canada, who is also the lead author of the paper on this discovery that appeared in the July 28th issue of the journal Nature, "These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see. But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth's surface". And this is how the study went down. From January 2010 to February 2011, the WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light and using the data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, more than 1, 55,000 asteroids were discovered in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, out of which 132 that were previously unknown. And amongst all, the 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. And from what is understood is that, the asteroid is roughly 1,000 feet (300 meters) in diameter, located about 50 million miles (80 million kilometers) away from Earth and with its complex orbit that sees it frequently crossing the plane of Earth's orbit (the Earth is always chasing the asteroid around), it has been predicted that that for the next 100 years.
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