At 01:06 AM 2/7/2013 -0500, k...@verizon.net wrote:
Next week (Feb 15) the earth will be visited by asteroid 2012 DA14 passing
inside the gestationary satellite orbits. To quote from
http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/2012DA14/2012DA14_planning.html,
2012 DA14 was discovered by the La Sagra Sky Survey in Spain on February
23, 2012.
This object will make an extremely close approach to within 0.00023 AU of
Earth at
19:25 UT (11:25 AM PST) on February 15, 2013. That is only 0.09 lunar
distances or 5.4 Earth
radii from the center of the Earth. The close approach will be about
28000 km above Earth's
surface. That's inside the distance to geosynchronous satellites but
thousands of kilometers
above the elevation for low-Earth-orbit spacecraft such as the
International Space Station.
At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will move about 0.8 degrees
per minute.
There is considerable interest in the astronomy community over plans to do
radar tracking of the asteroid. The Goldstone 70M dish will be running MAX
QRO with 435 kW.
73 de Tom, K3IO
I know some might think this is off topic, but I enjoy seeing reports
like these on the BB.
Thanks Tom.
KB7ADL
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