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Recently Discovered Near-Earth Asteroid Makes Record-breaking Approach to Earth
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1100171/posts


70 posted on 08/09/2004 4:39:33 PM PDT by Truth666
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To: Truth666

TIMING FOR THIS STORY - BREAKING

After a time of 'silence', discoveries of so-called 'minor planets' came in a hurry today - astronomers detected at least 10 new objects in the last 24 hours.
These discoveries are being reported to the Minor Planet Center (MPC) and being published on the so-called NEO confirmation page.
Now have look on today's discoveries:
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/NEO/ToConfirm.html
Object AO89913 is very interesting, scroll back the ephemeridis by 67 hours and you will see a dramatic drop in "V" which describes brightness and a decreasing value in 'V' means increasing brightening. Further there was a huge increase in "motion" which describes sky-mechanical size of the object. The MPC signed the trajectory at that point (08/07/04) with "***" which means the object will come close as 0.0027 AU or 1 Lunar distance in the following 100 hours.
There's still a great deal of uncertainty with this prelimanary trajectory but the object might have come extremely close in the last 72 hours or will do so in the next 24 hours.
Beyond this object there are others which are also supposed to come 'close' especially AO86297 because its trajectory has been confirmed and a MPEC bulletin with more information will be posted soon but at this stage I can tell you it's also going to be a 'near miss', 5 to 10 lunar distances is a first estimate.
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/NEO/ToConfirm.html
71 posted on 08/10/2004 3:02:30 AM PDT by Truth666
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