Asteroid Makes Rare Close Flyby of Earth
On January 29 at 12:33 A.M Pacific time or 3:33 A.M Eastern time, asteroid 2007 TU24 flew past Earth with it’s closest distance of about 537,500 kilometers (334,000 miles). The asteroid is between 150 meters (500 feet) and 610 meters (2,000 feet) in size and somewhat asymmetrical in size. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena CA obtained the first images of the asteroid using high-resolution radar data.
The asteroid was discovered by the NASA-sponsored Catalina Sky Survey on Oct 11, 2007. Then on January 23, 2008, the first radar detection of the asteroid was secured by the Goldstone 70 - meter (230 foot) antenna. The antenna is part of the NASA’s Deep Space Network Goldstone station in southern California’s Mojave Desert. Goldstone’s 70 - meter diameter (230 ft) antenna can track a space craft traveling more than 16 billion kilometers (10 billion miles) from Earth. The asteroid will quickly become fainter as it moves farther from Earth. At that time it will be observable in dark and clear skies through amateur telescopes with aperture of at least 76 centimeters (three inches).
It is the asteroid’s closest Earth approach for more than 2,000 years. “This will be the closest approach by a known asteroid of this size or larger until 2027,” said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program Offices at JPL. The program commonly called “Spaceguard” discovers characteristics and computes trajectories for these objects to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.
Scientists at NASA’s JPL had tracked the asteroid in advance and determined that there was no possibility of an impact. Because of good weather conditions, it was an excellent opportunity to perform scientific observations. Scientists can use this situation to scrutinize images and gather data to learn more about our solar system’s closest neighbors - near - Earth asteroids. On February 1 through 4 more observations are planned using the Arecibo (sic) Observatory in Puerto Rico.
The observatory is operated by Cornell University, Ithaca NY for the National Science Foundation. Scientists working with Steve Ostro, astronomer and his team on the project include Lance Benner and Jon Georgini (sic) of the JPL, Mike Nolan of the Arecibo Observatory and Greg Black of the University of Virginia.
This entry was posted on Saturday, February 16th, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
