Saturday 6 June 2020

Outer Space: 1998 OR2 was Spotted by Telescope



Science Loop from Youtube has something pretty interesting to show you. The 1998 OR2 Asteroid can be seen on a Telescope. Here, the "Celestron Powerseeker 76az" telescope was used. "Stary night software" was also used. It is interesting that a Smartphone could track it.

"On April 29, asteroid 1998 OR2 will safely pass by 3.9 million miles/6.2 million kilometers," scientists with NASA's Asteroid Watch program said.

1998 OR2, a large near-Earth asteroid, safely passes by our planet. Astronomers get an exceptional opportunity to study the 1.5-mile-wide (2-kilometer-wide) object in great detail.

This time, the asteroid gets no closer than about 3.9 million miles (6.3 million kilometers), passing more than 16 times farther away than the Moon.

Read more details from the NASA website here:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/asteroid-1998-or2-to-safely-fly-past-earth-this-week - nasa.gov

Asteroid 1998 OR2 was discovered by the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in July 1998, and for the past two decades astronomers have tracked it. As a result, they understand its orbital trajectory very precisely. They can say with confidence that this asteroid poses no possibility of impact for at least the next 200 years. Its next close approach to Earth will occur in 2079, when it will pass by closer - only about four times the lunar distance.

3 comments:

  1. 1998 OR₂ is an asteroid on an eccentric orbit, classified as a near-Earth object and potentially hazardous asteroid of the Amor group, with a diameter of 2 kilometers. It was discovered on 24 July 1998, by astronomers of the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking program at the Haleakala Observatory, Hawaii.

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  2. Thanks IB for sharing this video in your blog...

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    1. Thanks, Science Loop. It's important to avoid a possible destruction of earth by asteroids.

      A near-Earth object (NEO) is any small Solar System body whose orbit brings it to proximity (nearness in space) with Earth. By convention, a Solar System body is a NEO if its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is less than 1.3 astronomical units (AU). If a NEO's orbit crosses the Earth's, and the object is larger than 140 meters (460 ft) across, it is considered a potentially hazardous object (PHO). Most known PHOs and NEOs are certainly asteroids, but a small fraction are comets.

      There are over 20,000 known near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), over a hundred short-period near-Earth comets (NECs), and a number of solar-orbiting important spacecraft and meteoroids large enough to be tracked in space before striking the Earth. It is now widely accepted that collisions in the past have certainly had a significant role in shaping the geological and biological history of the Earth.

      Read more about Near-Earth objects here:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-Earth_object

      The following is a story about the largest meteor in more than a century that crashed in Western Siberia. The Chelyabinsk meteor was a superbolide that entered Earth's atmosphere over Russia on February 15, 2013. It was caused by an approximately 20 m near-Earth asteroid with a speed of 19.16 ± 0.15 kilometres per second. It quickly became a brilliant superbolide meteor over the southern Ural region.

      A bolide is an extremely bright meteor, especially one that explodes in the atmosphere. In astronomy, it refers to a fireball about as bright as the full moon, and it is generally considered a synonym for a fireball. In geology, a bolide is a very large impactor.

      A superbolide is a bolide that reaches an apparent magnitude of −17 or brighter, which is roughly 100 times brighter than the full moon. Recent interesting examples of superbolides include the Sutter's Mill meteorite in California and the Chelyabinsk meteor in Russia.

      2013: Meteor Strikes Russia, Over 1,000 Believed Injured

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