NASA radar photographs present stadium-sized asteroid tumbling by Earth throughout flyby (pictures)

A stadium-sized asteroid tumbled harmlessly previous Earth this month as a strong NASA radar system watched.

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Asteroid 2008 OS7 handed by Earth on Feb. 2, 2024 at a secure distance of 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers), about 7.5 instances farther than the Earth-moon distance. Whereas there was no threat of the house rock harming our planet, scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the subtle Goldstone Photo voltaic System Radar (GSSR) to supply a sequence of photographs of the asteroid because it handed by us.

The brand new observations helped nail down the asteroid’s measurement, because it had been too distant for many planetary radar programs to picture sufficiently till this month’s shut move.

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Asteroid 2008 OS7 orbits the solar each 2.6 years, passing inside the orbit of Venus at its closest to the solar and out previous the orbit of Mars at its farthest. 2008 OS7 is designated as “probably hazardous” because of its measurement and the way near Earth it passes, nevertheless it will not come this near our planet for an additional 200 years, JPL wrote in a statement about these new observations.

When it was first found in 2008 throughout a routine seek for near-Earth objects (NEOs), scientists estimated asteroid 2008 OS7 to be round 650 to 1,640 ft (200 and 500 meters) huge.

A balck and white image of an asteroid streaking through the stars

Asteroid 2008 OS7 seems as a white dot on a starry background on this picture by Gianluca Masi of the Digital Telescope Challenge in Ceccano, Italy taken through the shut move on Feb. 2, 2024. (Picture credit score: Gianluca Masi/The Digital Telescope Challenge)

Utilizing JPL’s radar observations on Feb. 2, scientists discovered that the asteroid is considerably smaller than these preliminary estimates; they now consider it to be round 500 to 650 ft (150 to 200 meters) throughout. The brand new observations additionally confirmed that 2008 OS7 rotates at an uncommonly gradual price, finishing one full rotation each 29.5 hours.

The Goldstone Photo voltaic System Radar’s DSS-14 antenna is the world’s solely totally steerable planetary radar system, according to JPL. It consists of a 230-foot (70 m) antenna dish housed on the Goldstone Deep Area Communications Complicated in California’s Mojave Desert and can be utilized to watch house particles, photo voltaic system our bodies and near-Earth asteroids comparable to 2008 OS7.

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