NASA Releases Stunning Video Of Near-Miss Asteroid

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By Damon Poeter

• November 8, 2011 08:53pm EST

• pcmag.com

A massive asteroid paid Earth a very close visit Tuesday and astronomers were able to capture stunning imagery of the near-miss rock, including a mini-movie put together by NASA (below).

Asteroid 2005 YU55 zoomed by the planet inside the Moon’s orbit and reached its closest proximity at 6:28 p.m. ET when it came within 201,700 miles of Earth. It’s the largest object on record to pass this close to us with our foreknowledge. And just like that, 2005 YU55 was zooming off into deep space once again at approximately 29,000 miles per hour.

“By animating a sequence of radar images, we can see more surface detail than is visible otherwise,” Lance Benner, a radar astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement upon the release of the space agency’s imaging sequence. “The animation reveals a number of puzzling structures on the surface that we don’t yet understand. To date, we’ve seen less than one-half of the surface, so we expect more surprises.”

The asteroid, which is a quarter of a mile in diameter or about the size of a city block, was never a threat to strike the Earth, according to astronomers. But if it had, experts said it would have “deliver[ed] a kinetic-energy punch equivalent to several thousand megatons of TNT … the kind of potential threat that outer-space sentries lose sleep over.”

Asteroid 2005 YU55 was discovered, you guessed it, back in 2005 by Robert McMillan at Steward Observatory’s Spacewatch Telescope in Arizona. The likely carbon-rich asteroid has a very round shape as documented in new images captured by two massive radio telescopes in California and Puerto Rico, and it spins around in a relatively long rotation period of 18 to 20 hours.

This particular asteroid has crossed our path before and is expected to fly by again. The last time 2005 YU55 swung by was in April 2010, while another somewhat smaller rock, 2010 XC15, is now known to have come even closer to Earth in 1976 than 2005 YU55 did earlier today, though at the time, nobody observed that passing.

The next time an object this large is expected to pass this close to the planet is in 2028, reports Scientific American, so space watchers are preparing to take advantage of a rare opportunity to observe an asteroid at relatively up-close range with ground-based telescopes.

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