MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

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By Shannon Hall, Space.com – “A mountain-size asteroid will zoom past Earth Monday, marking the closest pass by such a large space rock until 2027.

Asteroid 2004 BL86, which is about 1,800 feet wide, will come within 745,000 miles of our planet Monday — about three times the distance between Earth and the moon. While this flyby poses no threat to Earth, it does present a rare opportunity to get a good look at a near-Earth asteroid, NASA officials say.

Scientists are eager to study 2004 BL86 to pinpoint its orbit, observe its surface and even look for moons. The plan is to track the fast-moving asteroid using the 230-foot dish-shaped Goldstone antenna at NASA’s Deep Space Network in California, as well as the 1,000-foot  Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. These radio dishes will beam microwave signals at the asteroid, which will then bounce off the target and return to Earth.

‘For objects that get this close, that are this large, the radar observations are really analogous to a spacecraft flyby in terms of the caliber of the data that we can get,’ said Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is the principal investigator for the Goldstone observations of the asteroid.

The resulting black-and-white images can reveal unprecedented details about asteroids, whereas most ground-based telescopes would see only a point of light. But the first item on the team’s checklist will be to …” Read more.