Small Asteroid 2010 AL30 Will Fly Past The Earth
- From: baalke@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:10:57 +0000 (UTC)
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news167.html
Small Asteroid 2010 AL30 Will Fly Past The Earth
Don Yeomans, Paul Chodas, Steve Chesley & Jon Giorgini
NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office
January 12, 2010
[Graphic)
Trajectory of Asteroid 2010 AL30 Past Earth on January 12/13, 2010
Asteroid 2010 AL30, discovered by the LINEAR survey of MIT's Lincoln
Laboratories on Jan. 10, will make a close approach to the Earth's
surface to within 76,000 miles on Wednesday January 13 at 12:46 pm
Greenwich time (7:46 EST, 4:46 PST). Because its orbital period is
nearly identical to the Earth's one year period, some have suggested it
may be a manmade rocket stage in orbit about the Sun. However, this
object's orbit, reaches the orbit of Venus at its closest point to the
Sun and nearly out to the orbit of Mars at its furthest point, crossing
the Earth's orbit at a very steep angle, and this actually makes it very
unlikely that 2010 AL30 is a rocket stage. Furthermore, our trajectory
extrapolations show that this object cannot be associated with any
recent launch and it has not made any close approaches to the Earth
since well before the Space Age began.
It seems more likely that this is a near-Earth asteroid about 10-15
meters across, one of approximately 2 million such objects in near-Earth
space. One would expect a near-Earth asteroid of this size to pass
within the moon's distance about once every week on average.
To take advantage of this close approach, there are plans to observe it
with the Goldstone planetary radar on Wednesday evening, Jan. 12
beginning at 6:20 PST. The radar data could dramatically improve the
object's orbit and provide additional information on its size and shape.
.
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