On Silent Wings

by : Donald Augustus Walbrecht

A small Aten-Class, Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA), which spends much of its orbital year inside the Earth's orbit. These rarely discovered Atens can cross earth's orbit twice each circuit and can be more dangerous than other NEAs, since such objects can only be seen by asteroid hunters near the horizon at twilight times or in the very breif nighttime overhead passages when the asteroid's aphelion extends beyond Earth's orbit.