Near Earth Objects: A brief review and a student project [Review]

摘要

We provide a general overview of asteroids which pass close to the Earth: Near Earth Objects (NEOs). NEOs provide information on the formation of the solar system, and may have played an important role in the history of life on Earth. They are easy targets for future space missions. We also describe how to measure the distance to an NEO: an observational exercise for undergraduates which is pedagogically rich, exciting, and requires only modest equipment. We use our own recent data to compute the,distances to two objects: 2002 NY40 and 2002 HK12. (C) 2004 American Association of Physics Teachers. [References: 39]