Russia’s State Space Corporation Roscosmos plans to place telescopes on its future lunar base in the southern pole of the Earth’s natural satellite to monitor dangerous asteroids and comets, Eurasia Diary reports citing Tass news.
"There are plans to install equipment on this [lunar] base to study deep space and special telescopes to track asteroids and comets that pose a danger of their collision with Earth," he said.
The telescopes on the Moon together with the satellites at the Lagrangian points of the Sun-Earth system are set to make up the global system of monitoring asteroid and comet dangers. The system will track potentially dangerous objects against the Sun’s background and in deep space, the scientist said.
As Bloshenko told TASS on Friday, in early November the Russian observation equipment spotted a new asteroid comparable by its size with the Chelyabinsk meteorite that had entered the Earth’s atmosphere in 2013. The new celestial body passed relatively close to the planet: at a distance of about 140,000 km.
