'No chance' of asteroid hitting us
2008-01-26 21:35
Washington - A small asteroid will travel relatively near to Earth next week, giving astronomers a rare opportunity for a close-up look.
Asteroid 2007 TU24 was first seen in October and is on a trajectory to pass Earth outside the Moon's orbit at a distance of 537 500km on Tuesday at 08:33 GMT.
The US space agency Nasa said it will not be visible to the naked eye but amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes should be able to spot it.
Nasa said the asteroid is anywhere between 150 metres and 610 metres long, and there is no chance it could hit the planet.
Astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will
be taking as close a look as they can as the building-sized
object hurtles past.
"We don't yet know anything about this asteroid," Mike
Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Puerto Rico observatory,
said in a statement.
He said such objects frequently pass near Earth, perhaps
one every five years or so, but such advance notice is rare.
TU24 is one of an estimated 7 000 so-called near-Earth
objects.
"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this,
and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen
before," said Nolan. "We really haven't sampled the population
enough to know what's out there."
After that, it will be nearly 20 years before such an
opportunity presents itself again.
"This will be the closest approach by a known asteroid of
this size or larger until 2027," said Don Yeomans, manager of
the Near Earth Object Programme Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, which watches for objects that could potentially
threaten Earth.