As asteroid recently went zipping by us and NASA/JPL captured some radar images of it. Gotta love this sequence:
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR
Radar images of asteroid 2014 JO25 were obtained in the early morning hours on Tuesday[April 18th, 2017], with NASA’s 70-meter (230-foot) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. The images reveal a peanut-shaped asteroid that rotates about once every five hours. The images have resolutions as fine as 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel.
Asteroid 2014 JO25 was discovered in May 2014 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona — a project of NASA’s Near-Earth Objects Observations Program in collaboration with the University of Arizona. The asteroid will fly safely past Earth on Wednesday at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The encounter is the closest the object will have come to Earth in 400 years and will be its closest approach for at least the next 500 years.
“The asteroid has a contact binary structure – two lobes connected by a neck-like region,” said Shantanu Naidu, a scientist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the Goldstone observations. “The images show flat facets, concavities and angular topography.”
The largest of the asteroid’s two lobes is estimated to be 2,000 feet (620 meters) across.
Can’t help but wonder about the material connecting the two lobs – solid? Doesn’t really seem like enough gravity would be present to hold it together if it wasn’t solid, but then there must be a reason for it to separate as well, and as close as the two lobes are, that doesn’t seem likely either.
