Asteroid
NASA has approved the DART mission which aims to slam into an asteroid and knock it off its course. Pictured: A mosaic image of asteroid Eros at it's north pole, taken by the robotic NEAR Shoemaker space probe February 14, 2000 immediately after the spacecraft's insertion into orbit. After a year of circling and taking pictures, NEAR will touch down on asteroid Eros February 12, 2001, to capture surface details, which will be the first time any craft has tried to land on a tumbling space rock. Getty Images/NASA/Newsmakers

European Space Agency (ESA)’s star-mapping space probe, the Gaia, has discovered three unknown asteroids.

The Gaia is a space telescope that scans the sky to map stars in the Milky Way galaxy, so its new discovery is a bit of a bonus find. It was launched in 2013 and is expected to operate until 2022. Gaia is precise in measuring the positions, distances and motions of the stars, so it comes as no surprise that it could also detect asteroids and comets during its observations.

Most of the detected asteroids by Gaia are known except for the three asteroids detected last December 2018. The new space rocks that were spotted by Gaia surprisingly had an orbit that is unique compared to usual asteroids.

The Haute-Provence Observatory in France conducted an analysis to determine the orbits of the asteroids Gaia has detected. Data was cross-examined and yielded surprising results.

The three asteroids, though members of the main asteroid belt, have a slightly strange movement around the Sun. Their orbits are tilted at 15 degrees or more compared to the orbital plane of the solar system.

"The population of such high-inclination asteroids is not as well studied as those with less tilted orbits, since most surveys tend to focus on the plane where the majority of asteroids reside," ESA officials explained in a statement. "But Gaia can readily observe them as it scans the entire sky from its vantage point in space, so it is possible that the satellite will find more such objects in the future and contribute new information to study their properties."

Also, with the Gaia’s online alert system, astronomers all over the world will be notified of the space probe’s primary data on asteroid detection. Through this, astronomers can conduct follow-up observations.

“This process may lead to new discoveries,” the official statement released by ESA read. “So far, several tens of asteroids detected by Gaia have been observed from the ground in response to the alert system, all of them belonging to the main belt, but it is possible that also near-Earth asteroids will be spotted in the future.”

Observatories of Haute-Provence Observatory, Kyiv Comet station, Odessa-Mayaki, Terskol, C2PU at Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur and Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network have been reported to be involved in data analysis of Gaia. ESA is calling for other space observatories that could help them on their mission.

Astronomers are hopeful that Gaia will collect more information about these asteroids to help them understand more about their properties.

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