On Friday, February 3, one of the most elongated asteroids ever detected by planetary radar flew past our planet. The object, which is more than three times as long as it is wide, safely missed Earth at a distance of about 1.8 million kilometers, a little less than five times the distance between the Moon and Earth. reported on her website NASA.
Although the asteroid – designated 2011 AG5 – was not in danger of hitting our planet, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California they watched closely and made invaluable observationswhich helped determine its size, rotation, surface details and, above all, shape.
Asteroid 2011 AG5
The approach provided the first opportunity to look closely at the asteroid since its discovery in 2011. It revealed an object about 500 meters long and about 150 meters wide, dimensions comparable to New York’s Empire State Building. Information about the size of this extremely elongated asteroid was revealed by the powerful 70-meter-high Goldstone Solar System Radar antenna at the Deep Space Network facility in California.
Asteroid 2011 AG5
“Of the 1,040 near-Earth objects we have observed with planetary radar so far, is this one of the longest we have ever seen,“ said Jet Propulsion Laboratory principal scientist Lance Benner, who co-led the observations.
Observations using the Goldstone radar took place from 29 January to 4 February and captured a number of details. In addition to a large and wide depression on one of the planet’s two hemispheres, 2011 AG5 has subtle dark and lighter areas that may indicate small surface features several tens of meters in diameter. If the planet could be seen with the human eye, it would look similar to a huge lump of charcoal.
Accurate measurements
In addition to contributing to a better understanding of what this object looks like up close, the radar observations also made it possible a key measurement of an asteroid’s orbit around the Sun. The radar provides precise distance measurements that can help scientists at NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) pinpoint an asteroid’s trajectory within the solar system.
2011 AG5 will orbit the Sun once every 621 days and will not make a close encounter with Earth until 2040, when it will safely pass our planet at a distance of about 1.1 million kilometers, or almost three times the Earth-Moon distance. The observations also confirmed that 2011 AG5 has a slow rotation rate – it rotates on its axis once every nine hours.
CNEOS calculates the orbits of all known near-Earth asteroids so that it can evaluate potential impact hazards. Both the Goldstone Solar System Radar Group and CNEOS are supported by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observation Program of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office.
