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A stadium-sized asteroid tumbled harmlessly previous Earth this month as a strong NASA radar system watched.
Asteroid 2008 OS7 handed by Earth on Feb. 2, 2024 at a protected distance of 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers), about 7.5 instances farther than the Earth-moon distance. Whereas there was no danger of the house rock harming our planet, scientists with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the subtle Goldstone Photo voltaic System Radar (GSSR) to provide a sequence of photographs of the asteroid because it handed by us.
The brand new observations helped nail down the asteroid’s measurement, because it had been too far-off for many planetary radar programs to picture sufficiently till this month’s shut go.
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Asteroid 2008 OS7 orbits the solar each 2.6 years, passing throughout the orbit of Venus at its closest to the solar and out previous the orbit of Mars at its farthest. 2008 OS7 is designated as “doubtlessly hazardous” as a result of its measurement and the way near Earth it passes, however it will not come this near our planet for one more 200 years, JPL wrote in a statement about these new observations.
When it was first found in 2008 throughout a routine seek for near-Earth objects (NEOs), scientists estimated asteroid 2008 OS7 to be round 650 to 1,640 toes (200 and 500 meters) vast.
Utilizing JPL’s radar observations on Feb. 2, scientists discovered that the asteroid is considerably smaller than these preliminary estimates; they now imagine it to be round 500 to 650 toes (150 to 200 meters) throughout. The brand new observations additionally confirmed that 2008 OS7 rotates at an uncommonly sluggish price, finishing one full rotation each 29.5 hours.
The Goldstone Photo voltaic System Radar’s DSS-14 antenna is the world’s solely absolutely steerable planetary radar system, according to JPL. It consists of a 230-foot (70 m) antenna dish housed on the Goldstone Deep Area Communications Advanced in California’s Mojave Desert and can be utilized to watch house particles, photo voltaic system our bodies and near-Earth asteroids resembling 2008 OS7.
