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Amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins from Utah (and fellow Solar System Ambassador) was able to capture images this morning of the newly found asteroid 2010 TD54 that whizzed by Earth — harmlessly — coming within about 46,000 km (less than 30,000 miles) of our planet. The small asteroid was only detected this past Saturday, and NASA’s Near Earth Object Office predicted there was only 1 in a million chance it would hit Earth, and was small enough that it wouldn’t survive a fiery trip through the atmosphere even if it was going to make crash head-on into Earth. Patrick put together a couple of “movies” from the images he captured. They show the asteroid whispering silently through the sky, although moving along fairly quickly at 17.37 km/s. Estimates are the asteroid is about 7.3 m wide, and contained the energy of about 22 kilotons if it would have come crashing through Earth’s atmosphere. For this animation, the mount was set to allow the target to pass through the field of view, and includes 16 five-second exposures shot between 08:51:51 and 08:54:04 UTC.
There’s an additional image below.
For this set of images, Patrick set the mount set to nearly follow the target. The animation includes 23 five- second exposures shot between 09:01:27 and 09:04:39 UTC.
Patrick uses a Paramount ME, Celestron C-14 operating at f/5.5, SBIG ST-10 binned 3×3 with clear filter. The field of view in this image is about 18×26 arc minutes.
“The target was rotating quickly during both sequences which is “reflected” (pun intended) by its rapidly changing brightness,” Patrick wrote on a news group webpage for asteroid and comet researchers.
Great work! And Universe Today thanks Patrick for allowing us to post his images/animations.
While most people are breathing a sigh of relief that this asteroid didn’t hit Earth, others are of the opinion this near miss was a missed opportunity. “The message here should be: It was a pity that TD54 *missed* Earth because it would have made a nice fireball and meteorite shower!” said astronomer and writer Daniel Fischer, who writes the Cosmos4U blog.
Other astronomers and meteorite buffs said this asteroid could have ended up like the famous 2008 TC3, the first asteroid to have been spotted before hitting Earth, which crashed in northern Sudan, providing a treasure trove of information about asteroids and the early solar system in a very handy “sample return.”
He caught something in the bottom left on the first vedio. I see three points of light blink on and off, anyone have any idea what that mite be?
Very cool vedio.
NIGHTFLY, if you look closely, through a few replays, you will see a lot more than 3 points blink. If you look very closely and include very dim objects you’ll see – ? perhaps thousands, at least hundreds.
Since this is made of more than one video combined the “objects” could be just random photons affecting the recording media.
Those little blips of light are either cosmic ray strikes or hot pixels, both of which commonly appear and disappear in CCD images taken in sequence. More than one astronomer has reported the “discovery” of a new astronomical object, only to realize later it was an image artifact.
“…..it was an image artifact.”
Are you sure those blips are not UFOs ‘flashing their lights’ as this ‘craft’ whizzed by Earth? 😀