On the 3rd of this month, an oblong asteroid passed safely past our planet at a distance of about 1.8 million kilometers, or just under five times the distance between the Moon and Earth.
And according to what “Russian Today” indicated, while there was no danger from the impact of the asteroid, called 2011 AG5, on our planet, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California tracked the object closely to help determine its size, rotation and surface details, and on In particular, its shape.
This close approach provided the first opportunity to take a detailed look at the asteroid since its discovery in 2011, revealing an object about 500 meters long and about 150 meters wide, dimensions similar to the famous Empire State Building (a skyscraper in New York City).
The powerful radar of the 70-meter Goldstone Solar System at the NASA Deep Space Network facility near Barstow, California, revealed the asteroid’s dimensions.
“Of the 1,040 NEOs detected by planetary radar so far, this is one of the most elongated objects we’ve seen,” said Lance Benner, the principal scientist at JPL who helped lead the observations.
The Goldstone Deep Space Observatory Center’s radar began observing it from January 29 to February 4, and picked up many other details: Besides a large, wide curvature in one of the asteroid’s hemispheres, 2011 AG5 contains darker and lighter regions that may indicate a small surface. Its width is a few tens of meters. If the human eye looked at the asteroid, it would appear as dark as coal.
Observations also confirmed that 2011 AG5 has a slow rotation rate, taking nine hours to complete an orbit.
In addition to contributing to a better understanding of what this object looks like up close, observations from the Goldstone Deep Space Observatory Center provide a key measurement of the asteroid’s orbit around the sun.
The radar provides accurate distance measurements that can help scientists at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) optimize the asteroid’s orbital trajectory.
Asteroid 2011 AG5 orbits the sun once every 621 days and will not have a very close encounter with Earth until 2040, when it will safely pass our planet at a distance of about 1.1 million kilometers, or nearly three times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
“Interestingly, shortly after its discovery, 2011 AG5 became a minor asteroid when our analysis showed it had little chance of impacting in the future,” said Paul Chodas, director of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL. The object has no chance of colliding, and these new range measurements by the planetary radar team will further pinpoint where it will be in the future.”
Earlier this month, #PlanetayDefense experts got a closer look at an unusually shaped #asteroid named 2011 AG5, which is helping scientists @NASAJPL‘s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies better calculate the asteroid’s orbital path around the Sun.
More: https://t.co/DBmEsIUrOB pic.twitter.com/oi2xXWXioF
— NASA Asteroid Watch (@AsteroidWatch) February 17, 2023