That comes from the WISE mission: http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/mission.html WISE is a whole sky infrared survey that happens to pick up asteroids. The spacecraft spins to survey a complete arc of sky roughly perpendicular to the Sun direction.

You'll also notice that during much of the 2000s, there is a gap in discoveries at about the 5 o'clock position. This corresponds to monsoon season in the southwest U.S. (roughly July to mid September). Most of the discovered asteroids in the past decade were made by the Catalina Sky Survey, based just outside of Tucson, AZ, and they generally don't bother observing during monsoon season because of the increase in cloud cover.

It's an optical telescope and it's designed for wavelengths from 450 nm to 1050 nm.

Ugh. Every time one of these stories comes up, someone has to bring up Velikovsky. As someone who studies early solar system evolution, I've had the "pleasure" of talking with Velikovsky supporters on numerous occasions. What Velikovsky wrote about was wide-scale rearrangements of the architecture solar system WITHIN HISTORICAL TIMES, based on nutty interpretations of classical mythology. What the article here discusses is a hypothesis for the formation of Triton during an event called the Nice model that is thought to have happened about 3.9 billion years ago (based on dating of large lunar basins from Apollo samples). During this time, a much more massive precursor to the Kuiper belt fueled the migration of the outer four giant planets, disrupting stable reservoirs of small bodies throughout the solar system. Once the ancient Kuiper belt was depleted of mass, the migration stopped (so the "fuel" is gone, and therefore this process can only occur once in the lifetime of the solar system). Had planetary migration occurred within historical times, then we would currently be in the midst of a massive bombardment of comets and asteroids, and the Earth's oceans would currently reside in the atmosphere (along with perhaps some rock vapor clouds). The Nice model and Late Heavy Bombardment is backed up by observations of the structure of the Kuiper belt, observations of other solar systems around other stars, radioisotope dating of lunar rocks (in a variety of isotope systems, but most especially K-Ar, and U-Pb), observations of the structure of the asteroid belt, dynamical models based on plausible initial conditions for the early solar system (constrained by aforementioned observations), observations of zircon crystals found in ancient Earth rocks, cratering chronologies of the rocky planets, the Moon, and icy satellites. Basically it's a preponderance of evidence pointing toward plausible models for the early history of the solar system. Velikovsky has tortured interpretations of ancient literature. Who do you think is more likely to be closer to describing reality?

According to Ciclops it's 480 km inward of the outer edge of the B ring, which puts it at a radial distance of 117,100 km

Wow, an astounding amount of ignorance is on display in this post. Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs, or NEOs if you prefer) may indeed be easier to visit than the Moon, and they are quite a bit easier to visit than Mars. Mainly this is due to the lack of appreciable gravity, so that the escape velocity from the surface adds only a negligible delta V to the total delta V budget required (for both landing and taking off again). You're not going to find yourself on a 100+ year orbit on an NEA. If you did find yourself on a 100+ year orbit and on on your way out of the inner solar system, then, by definition, you would have landed on a Halley-type comet (or perhaps even a long-period comet if you were *really* on your way out). Take as a typical NEA 433 Eros. The NEAR spacecraft successfully landed on it, despite the fact that the spacecraft was designed to be an orbiter (which, I think, succinctly illustrates how easy it is to land on an asteroid). Its perihelion distance (closest approach to the Sun) is 1.13 AU (1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance) and has a period of a bit less than 2 years. Once nice thing about asteroids is that they basically represent remnants of the original solar nebula from which planets were formed, and most of them never differentiated (melted and formed iron cores and rocky mantles). That means that they are relatively rich in many raw materials compared to the surfaces of planet-sized bodies. A carbonaceous asteroid contains valuable metals (often as little blobs of pure metal), water (up to 30% by weight in many cases), and organics (kerogen). Some other asteroids are nothing but metal, and would require very minimal processing to make them useful (unlike many ores found on Earth). Going to asteroids makes a lot of sense. The main difficulty with an asteroid vs. a lunar mission is that the mission length to an asteroid would be longer than one to the Moon (although depending on the asteroid, it could be much shorter than a Mars trip).

It is actually quite possible that Charon formed in exactly the same way as the Earth-Moon system. See this abstract. Most modern planet formation simulations show that the end stage of formation involves collisions between large proto-planets. Whether or not any particular giant collision results in a satellite or not depends on the details such as impact velocities and angles. Double bodies such as Earth-Moon and Pluto-Charon are likely to be relatively common outcomes given what we know of planet formation.