Posted on 03/20/2021 8:46:29 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The largest asteroid to come near our planet this year will swing by Sunday (March 21), giving astronomers a rare opportunity to glimpse a remnant from the birth of our solar system, astronomers say.
2001FO32, first discovered in 2001, has a well-known orbit and poses no danger to Earth.
At its closest encounter with our blue orb, the space rock will still be a whopping 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) away, about the distance you would travel if you flew 50 times around the globe. "There is no chance the asteroid will get any closer to Earth than 1.25 million miles," Paul Chodas, the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, said in a NASA statement. That means, there's no need to worry about an imminent collision; in fact, there's no need to worry about it for centuries to come, NASA said.
2001FO32 is estimated to be somewhere between 1,300 and 2,230 feet (440 and 680 meters) wide, but when it was first discovered in 2001, scientists thought it was about 3,000 feet (1 km) wide. The upcoming close encounter will allow scientists a chance to better measure the beast.
This close encounter will allow astronomers to not only get a better understanding of the asteroid's size but also figure out its makeup. With NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on top of Hawaii's Mauna Kea, for example, astronomers hope to measure how light reflects off the asteroid's surface to figure out what minerals it's made of.
What's more, researchers also hope to bounce radar signals off of the asteroid using dish antennas from NASA's Deep Space Network to better understand its size and rotation rate, and to potentially discover surface features or small satellites (for example, a small moon).
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
“Bleem miserable venchit! Bleem forever mestinglish asunder frapt.Gashee morphousite, thou expungiest quoopisk!
Fripping lyshus wimbgunts, awhilst moongrovenly kormzibs.
Gerond withoutitude form into formless bloit, why not then? Moose.”
Scritch, scritch, bam, bam, bam! Hang on, the translators stuck again. Damn chinese crap.
It will be another in an endless line of disappointments... :-)
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