Matt Gialich

I mean, sorry, it's orbiting around the sun.

So at different times, it's different distances from us.

There's times this asteroid has come within a million miles of the Earth.

There's times, like right now, where this asteroid is somewhere in the range of about 50 million miles away, racing towards us.

And so when you have it going around the sun, there'll be a little bit of plane.

For the most part, we're pretty in lockstep, but they'll be out of phase a little bit, and they'll rotate at different speeds.

Yeah, it's something.

So what we are going after is a specific type of asteroid called a near-Earth asteroid.

These are newly discovered.

In 2000, I think we had discovered about seven of them.

There's estimated now to be, we think scientifically it's 10 million of them.

It's a good round number to think there is.

Now, this ranges in particle size, you know, from down to like really, really small up to about a kilometer and a half in diameter.

One really important thing happened recently, though.

The Rubin Telescope came online.

Rubin Observatory, in its first viewing, found 4,000 bodies.

Now, about half of them were new.

That's a huge discovery in a huge amount of time, and it really correlates to that paper saying we think there's about 10 million of these near-Earth asteroids.

What near-Earth asteroids do for us is just allow our trip times to be much shorter.

If I have to go 10 million miles away from the Earth, that's a lot faster than going out to the belt.