Jupiter's Trojans

yesterday's Featured Wikipedia page

check out all the roids!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Trojan

Originally posted by zeeblebot
yesterday's Featured Wikipedia page

check out all the roids!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Trojan

Didn't realize there were so many. I guess nobody did till a few years ago. I think a few have been found in Earth's Lagrangians also.

You can always find a quite small asteroid if you know their orbital parameters. Thos of the Lagrangian points are easy. The Trojans satellites have been known theoreticly since the days of Lagrange, the first actual one at 1904. By the year of 1938, 11 Trojans had been observed.

I don't think any Eartly Lagrangian objects has been observed. These points are used by certain type of satellites and would be very dangerous if there were any natural objects at these points.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
You can always find a quite small asteroid if you know their orbital parameters. Thos of the Lagrangian points are easy. The Trojans satellites have been known theoreticly since the days of Lagrange, the first actual one at 1904. By the year of 1938, 11 Trojans had been observed.

I don't think any Eartly Lagrangian objects has been observed. These poin ...[text shortened]... pe of satellites and would be very dangerous if there were any natural objects at these points.

They would be in trouble but for the fact those lagrangian 'points' are actually rather large physically and covers a huge volume of space, much larger than Earth for instance. So a probe sent there like some telescopes already have would encounter just about the same amount of space junk there as anywhere else. I think also, any trapped trojan in earths orbit would not have a huge relative velocity to any other object there naturally, of course some can be going retrograde and have a higher relative velocity than prograde ones but I think they are rather on the slow side compared to normal asteroids or cometary orbits.

There are probes already there and been there for years with no apparent damage.