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WHOA: Get a load of Asteroid DX110 JUST MISSING planet EARTH
100ft space rock ducked between our planet and THE MOON
Updated + vids Asteroid 2014 DX110 will, on Wednesday, March 5, pass Earth within 345,600km – that's closer than the Moon at 384,400km. The fly-by should be a beauty: the asteroid is a 30m (98ft) space rock that will whizz by at 2106 UTC (1306 PST, 1606 EST).
Updated at 2345 UTC to add: See below for videos of the event.
The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope's survey of the heavens turned up 2014 DX110 in late February, and its observations, along with work from England's Great Shefford Observatory, yielded the near Earth (and quite close to the Moon) orbit now attributed to the DX110 asteroid.
As Universe Today notes, NASA currently rates 2014 DX110 as a low-risk asteroid: for this pass, the chance of an Earth impact are one-in-ten-million.
The 2014 DX110 object has a fairly brief orbit around the Sun – just 1,192 days – and it's an Apollo-class asteroid, a group whose orbits cross Earth's, with more than 5,700 known members. The Chelyabinsk asteroid was also Apollo-class.
This asteroid is passing considerably closer than 2000 EM26, which was expected to provide a video feast, but went camera-shy for its big moment.
Since it was this author that pimped the EM26 no-show, Vulture South is almost loth to point readers to the video stream of the fly-by below, but we'll take the chance. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
