(CNN) An odd kind of asteroid has been hiding out in our solar system, close to Venus, and it took a new state-of-the-art surveying camera to detect it.

The Zwicky Transient Facility, known as ZTF, was installed on the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the California Institute of Technology's Palomar Observatory in March. Since then, it has observed over a thousand supernovae outside our galaxy, extreme cosmic events and more than a billion Milky Way stars.

The orbit of asteroid 2019 AQ3, discovered by ZTF, is shown in this diagram. The object has the shortest "year" of any recorded asteroid, with an orbital period of just 165 days.

"Astronomers are energized" by what the camera has enabled them to do in the first year of operations, said Shri Kulkarni, principal investigator of the camera, in a statement.

ZTF is also pretty good at spotting near-Earth asteroids that zoom past our planet. Scientists want to find and catalog as many of these as they can, especially those between 10 and 100 meters in diameter. These are the asteroids that could make a severe impact if they collided with Earth. The ones coming from the direction of the sun are the most dangerous because the glare helps hide them from our view.

But this asteroid, known as 2019 AQ3, isn't like anything they've seen before. Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology's data and science center for astronomy, spotted the images of the asteroid on January 4.

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