Watch as 2016 VA winks out as it hits Earth’s shadow
Image credit: The Virtual Telescope Project.
Posted on 11/02/2016 7:56:36 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Discovered just yesterday by the Mount Lemmon Sky Survey based outside of Tucson Arizona, 2016 VA passed just 58,600 miles (93,700 kilometers) from the surface of the Earth this morning at 00:42 Universal Time (UT). That’s a little over 20% of the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and just over twice the distance to the ring of geosynchronous and geostationary satellites around the Earth.
This sort of close pass of a newly discovered asteroid happens a few times a year. What made 2016 VA’s passage unusual, however, was its transit through the Earth’s shadow. The discovery was announced yesterday by the Minor Planet Center, and astronomer Gianluca Masi soon realized that the Virtual Telescope Project had a unique opportunity to capture the asteroid on closest approach.
Gianluca Masi explained how the difficult capture was done:
“The image is a 60-second exposure, remotely taken with “Elena” (a PlaneWave 17” +Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E robotic unit) available at the Virtual Telescope project. The robotic mount tracked the extremely fast apparent motion of the asteroid, so stars are trailing. The asteroid is perfectly tracked; it is the sharp dot in the center, marked with two white segments. At imaging time, asteroid 2016 VA was at about 200,000 kilometers from us and approaching.”
...
2016 VA is also a similar size to another famous space rock: the 20 metre asteroid that exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk the day after Valentine’s Day in 2013. 2016 VA gave us a miss, and won’t make another pass as close to the Earth again for this century.
(Excerpt) Read more at universetoday.com ...
To bad we couldn’t get it to land in DC.
That’s cool.
If you are in the Tucson area, the UofA has a good public program at one of the telescopes on Mt. Lemmon.
It’s a great program and you do get to visit the telescope mentioned in the original posting used for the NEO survey.
The university also has a public outreach astronomy program with lectures at one of the downtown breweries. Who could think of a better idea...:^)
https://www.as.arizona.edu/space-drafts-public-talk-series
Perhaps symbolizing the near miss our nation had with a Hillary presidency.
Re: 2016 VA was moving at 1500” a minute
Does that notation mean 1500 miles per minute?
So, 90,000 miles per hour?
That sounds almost unbelievably fast.
From memory, not even an Earth launched spacecraft, with multiple gravity assists, is moving that fast.
Well it looks like that was about 5 minutes, from the text at the end of the video.
So maybe that is right. Took about 5 minutes to do a complete pass of earth. Depending where on the globe the shadow was from, that seems about correct.
Yesterday, “Business Insider” posted several videos of a solar flare that, according to the headline, was moving at “900 Million Miles Per Second.”
As I recall my Einstein, the size of a body increases exponentially as it approaches the speed of light.
Which means the solar flare “ate” our entire solar system in a couple of seconds.
By the way...
My thanks to BenLurkin for posting.
Now that SunkenCiv has vanished from the pages of Free Republic, BenLurkin might be FR’s last go-to guy for science and technology news.
Considering how abjectly ignorant I am on science, technology, astronomy and math.....probably not.
What happened with SunkenCiv? I always enjoyed his posts.
I've never read a definitive answer here.
My impression was that SunkenCiv was not a big Trump fan, and I think I recall two really heated discussions he had with pro-Trump supporters.
One FR Commenter wrote that Civ got a warning from the FR monitors, and that Civ was so insulted he just walked away.
Anyway, the guy had a great eye for interesting and well written science and technology articles, and I learned more from his posts than from any other poster at FR.
Plus, I think he posted 24-7 every day of the week.
I'd get home from work after midnight, here on the West coast, and there would always be fresh Civ posts up on FR.
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