The first ever satellite designed to monitor space for asteroids was launched into orbit Monday aboard an Indian rocket.
The Canadian Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Space Surveillance Satellite took off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India, at 7:31 a.m.,, according to Space.com. The $12 million satellite will search the cosmos for asteroids and other near Earth objects that may pose a potential threat to the planet. The satellite will also monitor space junk to prevent any costly collisions.
"NEOSSat will probably reduce the impact hazard from unknown large NEO's [near-Earth objects] by a few percent over its lifetime, but is not designed to discover small asteroids near the Earth that may be on collision courses," Alan Hilderbrand, NEOSSat co-principal investigator at the University of Calgary said.
Researchers say the satellite will search for asteroids that are at least 31 million miles away from Earth. Equipped with the latest gadgets. the satellite will be able to spot at least 50 percent of the asteroids that are half-a-mile across or larger in size.
"This spacecraft is designed to be able to search the sky near the sun, which is difficult for Earth-based telescopes to do, and so it therefore complements ground-based search programs," Hildebrand said.
Also aboard the rocket was a ocean-monitoring SARAl satellite which is a first in a series of ISRO satellites created to image the Earth and to conduct oceanic and atmospheric studies, officials said.