Asteroid Double Whammy Near Earth Wednesday
Posted by admin on 09/08/2010
Get out your telescopes! Two small asteroids will come within moon distance of Earth Wednesday.
The first, asteroid 2010 RX30, will come within 154,100 miles of Earth — about 60 percent of the Earth-moon distance — at 5:51 a.m. EDT (1251 UT). This asteroid is estimated to be about 42 feet across.
The second, 2010 RF12, will come almost 12 hours later, at 5:12 p.m. EDT (0012 UT Thursday). It will swing by Earth at just 20 percent the Earth-moon distance, or 47,845 miles. 2010 RF12 is even smaller, only about 23 feet across.
Both were just discovered Sept. 5 by astronomer Andrea Boattini, working with a 1.5-meter reflecting telescope at Mount Lemmon in Arizona as part of the Catalina Sky Survey’s routine scanning of the skies.
According to NASA’s Near-Earth Object impact risk tables, the odds that 2010 RF12 will hit the Earth are about 1 in 50, and the odds of an impact with 2010 RX30 are less than 1 in 1,000. Both objects are too small to do much damage even if they were to smack into the Earth: Much of their rocky mass probably wouldn’t survive the trip through Earth’s atmosphere.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/asteroid-double-whammy-near-earth-tomorrow/#ixzz0yxbzZg7q
via Asteroid Double Whammy Near Earth Wednesday | Wired Science | Wired.com.
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