Is it true that a double asteroid...?

Question

Is it true that a double asteroid is going to come close to Earth in the next few days?

Answer 1

Close? Not exactly. It'll be passing at 1.4 million miles, about six times the average distance of the moon from us.

Answer 2

Yes, I got this from space.com (a pretty good site for this kind of science news, and a lot faster than asking a question here):

Asteroid Cruises Past Earth ... With a Partner!

By Robert Roy Britt

Senior Science Writer

posted: 13 July 2008

12:45 pm ET

"A good-sized asteroid sailing past our planet right now turns out to be two giant rocks doing a celestial jig.

The setup, catalogued as 2008 BT18, was thought to be nearly a half-mile wide after its discovery by MIT's LINEAR search program in January. Nothing else was known about it.

Now seen as two objects orbiting each other, the pair will be closest to Earth on July 14, at about 1.4 million miles (2 million kilometers) away. That's nearly six times as far from us as the moon.

It will not strike the planet. But scientists want to learn more about binary asteroids because one day they might find one headed our way. Deflecting a binary off course could be considerably more challenging that altering the path of a single rock.

Radar observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico on July 6 and 7 "clearly show two objects," said Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The objects are estimated to be 1,970 feet (600 meters) and 650 feet (200 meters) in diameter. The larger one rotates upon its axis in 3 hours or less.

Additional observations from NASA's Goldstone radar in the Mojave Desert in California are expected to reveal more about the density, shapes and orbit of the pair."

Answer 3

Yes...tomorrow. (Monday 7-14-08) It is called 2008 BT18. It's what's called a Binary Asteroid System. They rotate around each other or more specifically around a central gravitational point. (Between them.) Binary Asteroid Systems are actually pretty common. They make up about 15 percent of the Near-Earth Asteroids. (NEO's)

They will miss Earth by about 6 times the distance to the moon. Go to the following links if you want to see both a news story as well as the main NASA link to the NEO web page. There is a Cool NEO simulator you can play with in there. The distance of 6 times the moons distance looks pretty close when viewed from this perspective. Here are the two links:



http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20080713/s...





http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=20...

Answer 4

http://www.spaceweather.com/

Near the bottom of this site there is a link to the people tracking about a thousand 'near earth' objects in the sky.