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The case for a deep search for Earth’s Trojan asteroids

Nature Astronomy volume 3, pages 193–194 (2019)Cite this article

The existence of Earth’s Trojan asteroids is not well constrained and represents a major gap in our inventory of small bodies in near-Earth space. Their discovery would be of high scientific and human interest.

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Fig. 1: A schematic diagram to illustrate the triangular Lagrange points (L4 and L5), Trojan asteroid orbits (green) and horseshoe-type orbits (blue).

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Acknowledgements

I thank NASA Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS; grant NNX15AD94G) and the US National Science Foundation (grant AST-1312498) for research support.

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  1. Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Renu Malhotra

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  1. Renu Malhotra
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Correspondence to Renu Malhotra.

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Malhotra, R. The case for a deep search for Earth’s Trojan asteroids. Nat Astron 3, 193–194 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-019-0697-z

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