[californiadisasters] Video: Asteroid Tumbles Past Earth

Video: Asteroid tumbles past Earth

November 8th, 2011, 11:09 am by Pat Brennan, O.C. Register science, environment editor

An aircraft-carrier-sized asteroid hurtled safely past Earth Tuesday, just as scientists predicted, and NASA released the first movie of the asteroid tumbling through space.

The movie is composed of images captured Monday by a massive radio antenna deep in the Mojave Desert. Its six frames show the asteroid, known as 2005 YU55, rotating as it approaches the planet.

The antenna, part of NASA's Deep Space Network facility at Goldstone, Calif., bounced signals off the asteroid to obtain the images, including one showing the 1,300-mile-wide space rock when it was about 860,000 miles from Earth shortly before noon Monday.

The asteroid made its closest approach to Earth at 3:28 p.m. Tuesday, when it was no closer than 201,700 miles from the planet — within the orbit of the moon.

"This is the closest approach of something this big that we've ever known about in advance," Lance Benner, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory , told reporters at the antenna site Monday.

The object was round, quite dark – "as reflective as a lump of charcoal," he said – and appears to have small craters and "linear features that may be ridges."

Scientists also were able to refine their understanding of the asteroid's orbit. Benner said it should make another, perhaps closer, pass by Earth in 2075, though it still will not hit the planet.

The last asteroid of comparable size to make such a close pass was in 1976, although astronomers did not know it at the time.

The next one is expected in 2028.

NASA scientists say the Goldstone antennas, set amid a high-desert landscape that is also home to wandering burros and desert tortoises, are typically used to communicate with a variety of interplanetary spacecraft, including Mars probes and rovers.

It is located on the Fort Irwin military base north of Barstow.

The antenna used to track the asteroid has a dish about 230 feet wide. The asteroid itself is about 1,300 feet across.

The agency tracks asteroids through its Near Earth Observation Program.

Source: http://sciencedude.ocregister.com/page/2/

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