Accomplished amateur astronomer and blogger Peter Lake, a.k.a “AstroSwanny” from Australia captured some of the first images of what will be a very close pass of Earth by asteroid 2011 MD. He actually took the image at 07:00 UTC on June 26th with a 20 inch telescope in New Mexico controlled via his iPhone, through the Global Rent-A-Scope program. Ahh, the wonders of technology! As Peter says, “Its not every day, that an asteroid misses by less than 3-5 earth Radii.”
The asteroid, which was only detected last week, is about 25 to 55 feet (8 to 18 m) across, is expected to pass less than 8,000 miles above Earth’s surface around 1 p.m. EDT (17:00 UT) on Monday, June 27th. The time of closest approach will be observable from South Africa and parts of Antarctica, but the approach will be visible across Australia, New Zealand, southern and eastern Asia, and the western Pacific.
Below is a video he compiled of the his observations of the pass, and used ten 120-second images for the video.
Peter also noted that “Its close approach is being followed with great interest, more for honing the skills and techniques of the Minor Planet Center and the network of asteroid hunting astronomers, rather than because it poses any real danger.”
Thanks to Peter and his Aartscope Blog for sharing these views with Universe Today.
2011 MD's orbital parameters. Credit: JPL Small-Body Database Browser
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A newly discovered house-sized asteroid will miss the Earth by less than 17,700 km (11,000 miles) on Monday June 27, 2011. That’s about 23 times closer than the Moon. The size and location of the asteroid, named 2011 MD, should allow observers in certain locations to take a look at the space rock, even with small telescopes. It’s closest approach will be at 13:26 UTC on June 27.
UPDATE 6/25: According to the latest info on JPL’s Solar System Dynamics website, the closest approach has been updated to be Monday, June 27, at about 17:00 UTC. At that time it will be about 0.0001247 AU, or 18,665 km from the planet’s center and about 12,280 km (about 7,500 miles) from its surface.
According to Skymania, 2011 MD was found just yesterday, June 22, by LINEAR, a pair of robotic telescopes in New Mexico that scan the skies for Near Earth Asteroids.
As of now, asteroid 2011 MD is estimated to be between 9 to 45 meters (10 to 50 yards) wide. Dr. Emily Baldwin, of Astronomy Now magazine, said there is no danger of the asteroid hitting Earth, and even if it did enter the atmosphere, an asteroid this size would “mostly burn up in a brilliant fireball, possibly scattering a few meteorites.”
JPL scientists agree. NASA’s Asteroid Watch program at JPL wrote in a Twitter post on June 23rd saying, “There is no chance that 2011 MD will hit Earth but scientists will use the close pass as opportunity to study it w/ radar observations,” adding later, “Asteroid 2011 MD measures about 10 meters. Stony asteroids less than 25 m would break up in Earth’s atmosphere & not cause ground damage.”
To find out updated information on 2011 MD’s ephemeris, physical parameters and more, including an orbit diagram and close-approach data, see this page on JPL’s Solar System Dynamics website.
Thanks to Space.com and the Tech Media Network for sharing this infographic showing how NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will reach out and grab a sample from asteroid RQ26 in 2020. Source SPACE.com:
The Earth seems like a safe place, most of the time. But we have evidence of terrible catastrophes in the ancient past, times when almost all life on Earth was wiped out in a geologic instant. What could have caused so much devastation? And will something like this happen again?
Faint dust plumes bookend asteroid (596) Scheila, which is overexposed in this composite. Visible and ultraviolet images from Swift's UVOT (circled) are merged with a Digital Sky Survey image of the same region. The UVOT images were acquired on Dec. 15, 2010, when the asteroid was about 232 million miles from Earth. Credit: NASA/Swift/DSS/D. Bodewits (UMD)
Asteroid or comet? That was the question astronomers were asking after an asteroid named Scheila had unexpectedly brightened, and seemingly sprouted a tail and coma. But follow-up observations by the Swift satellite and the Hubble Space Telescope show that these changes likely occurred after Scheila was struck by a much smaller asteroid.
“Collisions between asteroids create rock fragments, from fine dust to huge boulders, that impact planets and their moons,” said Dennis Bodewits, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park and lead author of the Swift study. “Yet this is the first time we’ve been able to catch one just weeks after the smash-up, long before the evidence fades away.”
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On Dec. 11, 2010, images from the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey, a project of NASA’s Near Earth Object Observations Program, revealed the Scheila to be twice as bright as expected and immersed in a faint comet-like glow. Looking through the survey’s archived images, astronomers inferred the outburst began between Nov. 11 and Dec. 3.
Three days after the outburst was announced, Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) captured multiple images and a spectrum of the asteroid. Ultraviolet sunlight breaks up the gas molecules surrounding comets; water, for example, is transformed into hydroxyl (OH) and hydrogen (H). But none of the emissions most commonly identified in comets — such as hydroxyl or cyanogen (CN) — showed up in the UVOT spectrum. The absence of gas around Scheila led the Swift team to reject the idea that Scheila was actually a comet and that exposed ice accounted for the brightening.
Hubble observed the asteroid’s fading dust cloud on Dec. 27, 2010, and Jan. 4, 2011. Images show the asteroid was flanked in the north by a bright dust plume and in the south by a fainter one. The dual plumes formed as small dust particles excavated by the impact were pushed away from the asteroid by sunlight.
The science teams from the two space observatories found the observations were best explained by a collision with a small asteroid impacting Scheila’s surface at an angle of less than 30 degrees, leaving a crater 1,000 feet across. Laboratory experiments show a more direct strike probably wouldn’t have produced two distinct dust plumes. The researchers estimated the crash ejected more than 660,000 tons of dust–equivalent to nearly twice the mass of the Empire State Building.
The Hubble Space Telescope imaged (596) Scheila on Dec. 27, 2010, when the asteroid was about 218 million miles away. Scheila is overexposed in this image to reveal the faint dust features. The asteroid is surrounded by a C-shaped cloud of particles and displays a linear dust tail in this visible-light picture acquired by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. Because Hubble tracked the asteroid during the exposure, the star images are trailed. Credit: NASA/ESA/D. Jewitt (UCLA)
“The Hubble data are most simply explained by the impact, at 11,000 mph, of a previously unknown asteroid about 100 feet in diameter,” said Hubble team leader David Jewitt at the University of California in Los Angeles. Hubble did not see any discrete collision fragments, unlike its 2009 observations of P/2010 A2, the first identified asteroid collision.
Scheila is approximately 113 km (70 miles) across and orbits the sun every five years.
“The dust cloud around Scheila could be 10,000 times as massive as the one ejected from comet 9P/Tempel 1 during NASA’s UMD-led Deep Impact mission,” said co-author Michael Kelley, also at the University of Maryland. “Collisions allow us to peek inside comets and asteroids. Ejecta kicked up by Deep Impact contained lots of ice, and the absence of ice in Scheila’s interior shows that it’s entirely unlike comets.”
The studies will appear in the May 20 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55 was generated from data taken in April of 2010 by the Arecibo Radar Telescope in Puerto Rico. Image credit: NASA/Cornell/Arecibo
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A large space rock will pass close to Earth on November 8, 2011 and astronomers are anticipating the chance to see asteroid 2005 YU55 close up. Just like meteorites offer a free “sample return” mission from space, this close flyby is akin to sending a spacecraft to fly by an asteroid – just like how the Rosetta mission recently flew by asteroid Lutetia – but this time, no rocket is required. Astronomers are making sure Spaceship Earth will have all available resources trained on 2005 YU55 as it makes its closest approach, and this might be a chance for you to see the asteroid for yourself, as well.
“While near-Earth objects of this size have flown within a lunar distance in the past, we did not have the foreknowledge and technology to take advantage of the opportunity,” said Barbara Wilson, a scientist at JPL. “When it flies past, it should be a great opportunity for science instruments on the ground to get a good look.”
2005 YU55 is about 400 meters [1,300 feet] wide, and closest approach will be about 325,000 kilometers (201,700 miles) from Earth.
“This is the largest space rock we have identified that will come this close until 2028,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL, and Yeomans assured that we are in no danger from this asteroid.
“YU55 poses no threat of an Earth collision over, at the very least, the next 100 years,” he said. “During its closest approach, its gravitational effect on the Earth will be so miniscule as to be immeasurable. It will not affect the tides or anything else.”
Astronomers estimate that asteroids the size of YU55 come this close to Earth about every 25 years. We just haven’t had this much advance warning – a testament to the work that Yeomans and his team does at the NEO Program in detecting asteroids and detecting them early.
So, here’s a chance for a close-up look. The 70-meter (230-foot) newly upgraded Goldstone antenna in California, part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, will be imaging the asteroid with radar.
“Using the Goldstone radar operating with the software and hardware upgrades, the resulting images of YU55 could come in with resolution as fine as 4 meters per pixel,” said Benner. “We’re talking about getting down to the kind of surface detail you dream of when you have a spacecraft fly by one of these targets.”
Combining the radar images with ground-based optical and near-infrared observations, astronomers should get a good overview of one of the larger near-Earth objects.
Look for more information in the near future about observing campaigns for amateur astronomers of this object. At first, 2005 YU55 will be too close to the sun and too faint for optical observers. But late in the day (Universal Time) on Nov. 8, and early on Nov. 9, the asteroid could reach about 11th magnitude for several hours before it fades as its distance rapidly increases.
This radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55 was generated from data taken in April of 2010 by the Arecibo Radar Telescope in Puerto Rico. Image credit: NASA/Cornell/Arecibo
2005 YU55 was discovered in December 2005 by Robert McMillan, head of the NASA-funded Spacewatch Program at the University of Arizona, Tucson. In April 2010, Mike Nolan and colleagues at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico generated some ghostly images of 2005 YU55 when the asteroid was about 2.3 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) from Earth.
“The best resolution of the radar images was 7.5 meters [25 feet] per pixel,” said JPL radar astronomer Lance Benner. “When 2005 YU55 returns this fall … the asteroid will be seven times closer. We’re expecting some very detailed radar images.”
Radar antennas beam directed microwave signals at their celestial targets — which can be as close as our moon and as far away as the moons of Saturn. These signals bounce off the target, and the resulting “echo” is collected and precisely collated to create radar images, which can be used to reconstruct detailed three-dimensional models of the object. This defines its rotation precisely and gives scientists a good idea of the object’s surface roughness. They can even make out surface features, and astronomers hope to see boulders and craters on the surfaces of 2005 YU55, as well as detailing the mineral composition of the asteroid.
“This is a C-type asteroid, and those are thought to be representative of the primordial materials from which our solar system was formed,” said Wilson. “This flyby will be an excellent opportunity to test how we study, document and quantify which asteroids would be most appropriate for a future human mission.”
Yeomans said this is a great opportunity for scientific discovery. “So stay tuned. This is going to be fun.”
Is the recently discovered “winking” asteroid – GP59 – really the missing panel from the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission? According to the latest internet buzz, it could be as possible as Mars being as large as the full Moon…
With the recent anniversary of the Apollo 13 disaster conveniently coinciding with the discovery of “winking” near-Earth asteroid GP59, anxious theorists are ready to believe they are one and the same. Thanks to the asteroid’s rapid tumble and quick magnitude changes, it’s no small wonder that it would appear on the surface to be so. Just take a look at this GP59 Video done by Joe Brimacombe and you’ll see why.
With discoveries of artifacts continually found on Earth, such as missing pieces of the Titanic, it wouldn’t take a great leap of faith to believe we might have recovered one in space as well – even the panel that blew away from Apollo 13. However, we need to take a look at that equation times four – the 4 panels that protected the LM during launch – the Spacecraft Lunar Module Adapter (SLA) panels. Says Marshall Eubanks, ” In the Saturn V launches, the SLA panels were ejected, with separation velocity of about 2 meters / second. They were 6.4 meters tall, about 3 meters wide at the apex, made of a 0.043 meters thick aluminum honeycomb, plus about 1 mm of cork and paint, and so have a very low mass-area ratio. If 2011 GP59 is an SLA panel, then it should have 3 clones with very similar orbits.”
With today’s huge advances in amateur telescopes, there remains a possiblity – however small – that we may someday recover objects like these. “I could see a situation in which a panel was spinning around its short axis, with that axis tilted a bit toward the Sun, so that there would be a systematic pressure accelerating or decelerating it. (Sort of like what the fans of spin-stabilized solar sails hope to do.) The problem would be that over a full orbit around the Sun, the net acceleration would cancel out.” says Bill Gray. “The bottom line remains: there is no particularly good reason to think there’s a connection between these panels and 2011 GP59. (Even if the panels were big enough to match the observed brightness of 2011 GP59, which they aren’t.) If the panels are ever recovered, they’re apt to be in much more Earth-like orbits. With 36 of them out there, the odds seem decent that we’ll see one of them someday.”
But don’t hold your breath when it comes to GP59… it is what it is… a tumbling, oblong asteroid roughly 47 meters in diameter. “Usually, when we see an asteroid strobe on and off like that, it means that the body is elongated and we are viewing it broadside along its long axis first, and then on its narrow end as it rotates ,” said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “GP59 is approximately 50 meters [240 feet] long, and we think its period of rotation is about seven-and-a-half minutes. This makes the object’s brightness change every four minutes or so.”
And our hearts skip a beat just thinking of the possiblities…
2011 GP59 imaged remotely from the GRAS Observatory. Credit: Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero
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A newly discovered asteroid could provide one of the best recent viewing opportunities for amateur astronomers, according to the British Astronomical Association. “This is the best NEO close approach these past few years and is bright enough to be observed visually in large (>20cm., or 8-inch) aperture telescopes when on the night of Thursday 14th it will appear as a faint slow-moving star,” writes Richard Miles, the director of the BAA’s Asteroids and Remote Planets Section.
UPDATE: See a new picture of asteroid 2011 GP59 from Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero taken on April 14, 2011, below.
2011 GP59 imaged remotely from the GRAS Observatory. Credit: Ernesto Guido & Giovanni Sostero
Guido & Sostero sent us a note that they imaged 2011 GP59 early on April 14, remotely from the GRAS Observatory (near Mayhill, New Mexico USA) through a 0.51-m, f/6.9 reflector + CCD.
“It’s a single unfiltered exposure of 600 seconds, showing 2011 GP59 as trail with brightness fluctuations clearly evident,” they said.
(end of 4/14 update)
2011 GP59 was discovered just a few days ago and will make its closest approach to the Earth on April 15 at 19h UT at 1.39 lunar-distances. But it will be brightest at an average magnitude of 13.2 around 00h UT on the night of April 14/15 when Miles says it will be very favorably placed in the sky for observers worldwide.
The asteroid is approximately 60 meters in diameter and appears to be rotating very quickly, about once every 7.35 minutes. Its oblong in shape and rotation will vary the object’s brightness every 4 minutes or so.
Miles reported that David Briggs observing with the Hampshire Astronomy Group’s 0.4-m instrument on the evening of April 11 commented, “This is probably the fastest rotator I’ve seen so far in that it completely disappears from view every 3 to 4 images.”
This object was discovered on the night of April 8/9 by the Observatorio Astronomico de Mallorca (OAM) using a 0.45-m f/2.8 reflector at their La Sagra facilities (J75) in Andalusia, Spain (see http://www.minorplanets.org/OLS/ ). The observers involved were S. Sanchez, J. Nomen, R. Stoss, M. Hurtado, J. A. Jaume and W. K. Y. Yeung.
The British Astronomical Association is also seeking observations of the Moon on Friday, April 15, between 19:00 and 21:00 UT, when the Aristarchus and Herodotus area of the Moon will match the same illumination, to within +/- 0.5 degrees, as that observed during the famous Transient Lunar Phenomena (TLP) seen by Greenacre and Barr from Flagstaff observatory back on Oct. 30, 1963.
TLPs are very short changes in the brightness of patches on the face of the Moon, which can last anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours and can grow from less than a few to a hundred kilometers in size. This phenomenon has been observed by hundreds of amateur and professional astronomers, but how and why this occurs is not understood. Some astronomers believe that they are the outcome of lunar outgassing, where gas is being released from the surface of the Moon, but most commonly astronomers think it could be an effect from Earth’s own atmosphere.
If you want to help understand TLPs and perhaps observe an event like this for yourself, the BAA Lunar Section is looking for high resolution monochrome, or especially color, images of this area during this time period,, which favors observers in Europe.
These are not the two asteroids that passed by Earth on Wednesday -- but is an illustration of a binary asteroid. (Credit: ESO/L. Calcada)
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Earth got a double dose of close asteroid flybys on Wednesday, April 6, 2011. Two newly discovered small asteroids both passed within the distance of the Moon. 2011 GW9 (10 meters wide) came within half the distance to the Moon, about 192,000 km 12:53 a.m. EDT and 2011 GP28 (6 meters wide) came within 77,000 km (.2 LD) at 3:36 p.m. EDT. Spaceweather.com said the size of these asteroids are two to three times smaller than the Tunguska impactor of 1908, and assured there was no danger of a collision with Earth.
Illustration of the Sun-Earth Lagrange Points. Credit: NASA
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There are plenty of near-Earth asteroids out there, but this latest one studied by two researchers at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland is extremely rare in that it has a weird, horseshoe-shaped orbit. Not that Asteroid 2010 SO16 does an about-face and turns around in mid-orbit — no, the asteroid always orbits the Sun in the same direction. But because of its unique orbital path and the gravitational effects from both the Earth and the Sun, it goes through a cycle of catching up with the Earth and falling behind, so that from our perspective here on Earth, its movement relative to both the Sun and the Earth traces a shape like the outline of a horseshoe: it appears to approach, then shift orbit, and go farther away without ever passing Earth.
This asteroid was discovered on September 17, 2010 by the WISE Earth-orbiting observatory.
There are only a handful of other asteroids known to have a horseshoe orbit. But astronomers Apostolos Christou and David Asher say 2010 SO16’s absolute magnitude (H=20.7) makes this the largest object of its type known to-date. It is just a few hundred meters across, so the other asteroids are extremely small, and none of the other horseshoe asteroids have orbits that are likely to survive for more than a few thousand years. But the researchers did computer simulations of SO16’s orbit, which showed it could stay in its orbit for at least 120,000 years, maybe more.
For an asteroid to have such an orbit means it is in almost the same solar orbit as Earth, and both take approximately one year to orbit the Sun.
“Two points are worth bearing in mind. First, objects further from the Sun than Earth, orbit more slowly. Second, objects that are closer to the Sun orbit more quickly than Earth.
So imagine an asteroid with an orbit around the Sun that is just a little bit smaller than Earth’s. Because it is orbiting more quickly, this asteroid will gradually catch up with Earth.
When it approaches Earth, the larger planet’s gravity will tend to pull the asteroid towards it and away from the Sun. This makes the asteroid orbit more slowly and if the asteroid ends up in a orbit that is slightly bigger than Earth’s, it will orbit the Sun more slowly than Earth and fall behind.
After that, the Earth will catch up with the slower asteroid in the bigger orbit, pulling it back into the small faster orbit and process begins again.
So from the point of view of the Earth, the asteroid has a horseshoe-shaped orbit, constantly moving towards and away from the Earth without ever passing it. (However, from the asteroid’s point of view, it orbits the Sun continuously in the same direction, sometimes more quickly in smaller orbits and sometimes more slowly in bigger orbits.)”
Right now, SO16 is near one of its closest points of approach, chasing the Earth on its inside orbit. It will be tagging along near Earth for the next few decades until it is pulled all the way over into the outside orbit and it slowly recedes from view.
The researchers say the existence of this long-lived horseshoe raises the twin questions of its origin and whether objects in similar orbits are yet to be found. Additionally, they suggest that SO16 may be a suitable test target for the direct detection of the Yarkovsky acceleration as it makes frequent close encounters with the Earth during the next decade.
