The European Space Agency, or ESA, has signed an accord with the Spanish-German Astronomical Center, which operates the Calar Alto Observatory in the mountains north of Almeria, to hunt for objects in space that represent a potential danger to Earth.In a statement, the observatory said the ESA will have the exclusive use of one of its telescopes to pinpoint Near Earth Objects (NEOs), comets and asteroids whose orbits around the sun, possibly modified by Earth’s gravitational pull, draw them close to Earth’s orbit.The deputy director of the Calar Alto Observatory, Jesus Aceituno, said that the accord, whose first period will last until March 2017 and is automatically renewable, grants ESA the use of the 80-centimeter Schmidt telescope.That telescope was shelved around 2001, but now observatory technicians have revamped it for remote observation.”The reparation and adaptation of the telescope has been made possible thanks to the efforts of the staff and has cost very little, but it will now provide a substantial source of revenue and will allow the observatory to set new research standards,” Aceituno said.The scientist said the NEOs “can come in very different sizes, from a few meters to dozens of kilometers. Of the 600,000 asteroids detected, some 10,000 fit the category of NEOs.””NEOs must be studied in depth, not only for the information they provide about the formation and evolution of our solar system, but also because we have to understand their physical properties as well as possible so that in the future we’ll be able to divert them and avoid collisions,” he said.The Spanish-German Astronomical Center of Calar Alto, a joint organization of the Max Planck Society and Spain’s High Council of Scientific Research, is located in the Sierra de los Filabres mountains, north of the city of Almeria.It is operated jointly by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy of Heidelberg, Germany, and the Astrophysics Institute of Andalusia in the southeastern Spanish city of Granada. EFE
Source: ESA hunts for potentially dangerous space objects from Spain | Fox News Latino
