This is our best look yet at asteroid 2014 JO25, which made its closest pass by Earth for at least the next 500 years on April 19, 2017. The animation above is composed of radar observations made from NASA’s Goldstone facility in California when the asteroid was between 1.53 and 1.61 million miles away. These…
Tag: radar
Worried About Asteroid 2014 JO25? Don’t Be.
SPACE NEWS FLASH: On Wednesday, April 19, the asteroid 2014 JO25 will pass by Earth, coming as close as about 1.1 million miles at 12:24 UTC (8:24 a.m. EDT / 5:24 a.m. PDT). Yes, this asteroid is fairly large—just under half a mile across—and is traveling very fast—about 21 miles a second— BUT even so it…
An Asteroid Approaches Your Planet: Roll a d10
It sounds like a surprise challenge posed by the “Dungeon Master” in a game of Dungeons & Dragons but this is sort of what happened on a cosmic scale on Feb. 6, 2017, when the 200-meter (656-foot) -wide asteroid 2017 BQ6 passed by Earth. Using the radar imaging capabilities of the giant 70-meter antenna at…
Pluto Is the New Science Star of the Solar System
Now over four months after the historic and long-awaited flyby of Pluto by New Horizons, planetary scientists have had a steady stream of unprecedented data arriving on Earth from the outwardly-speeding spacecraft. We’ve learned more about Pluto in the past few months than we had over the decades before and the information is still being analyzed…
NASA Hits Halloween Asteroid With Radar
On the afternoon of Oct. 31, 2015, Earth was visited by something much creepier than the typical Halloween trick-or-treater: a dark 2,000-foot (600-meter) -wide asteroid that sped silently (because space) by, approaching at its closest only about 1.3 times the distance to the Moon. Designated 2015 TB145, this particular near-Earth object had only just been…
Ground-Based Radar Reveals the Surface of Venus
These days if you look toward the west after sunset you’ll see a bright star that’s the first to appear in the sky – except it’s not a star at all but our neighboring planet, Venus. Covered in a dense layer of thick clouds, Venus not only reflects a lot of sunlight but also keeps its…
Despeckled Radar Images Give a Clearer View of Titan’s Shores
At 1,600 miles (2,576 km) across Titan is by far Saturn’s largest moon – in fact it’s the second-largest satellite in the solar system. It’s also the only world besides Earth where liquids have been found in large amounts on the surface, in the form of lakes and streams of frigid methane and ethane. This makes Titan…
Telescope Tag-Team Reveals an Asteroid Beast’s Beauty
Telescope twin powers: ACTIVATE! Form of… an asteroid? Okay, so the telescopes involved aren’t twins — one is a giant 70-meter dish in California’s Mojave Desert and the other is a 305-meter behemoth high in the Puerto Rican rain forest — they did combine their powers to image the passing asteroid 2014 HQ124 on June 8…
The Desert Dishes of Apollo Valley
Deep in the Mojave desert of central California, scattered among the scrub-covered hills and rugged, rock-strewn fields, are enormous white radar dishes pointed at the sky — NASA’s “ears” for listening to the faint calls coming from its many spacecraft out exploring our solar system. I recently had the opportunity to pay a visit to the Deep…
Meet the Asteroid That Could Smash Into Earth in 2880
There are over 10,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) that have been identified so far, asteroids and comets of varying sizes that approach the Earth’s orbital distance to within about 28 million miles (45 million km). Of the 10,000 discoveries, roughly 10 percent are larger than six-tenths of a mile (one kilometer) in size – large enough to have…
Passing 2-Mile-Wide Asteroid Has Its Own Little Moon
On the afternoon of Friday, May 31, 2013, at 4:59 p.m. EDT, the nearly two-mile-wide asteroid 1998 QE2 will pass by our planet at a distance of about 5.86 million km (3.64 million miles)… about 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. And although it poses no threat of impacting Earth neither during…
So What Did Asteroid 2012 DA14 Actually Look Like?
Something like this: This video was made from 72 radar observations made on the night of Feb. 15/16, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, CA. The target object, a ~40-meter wide asteroid named 2012 DA14, passed within 17,200 miles (27,680 km) of Earth — coming several thousand…
Lights in the Dark 