Wednesday, April 07, 2010

DUCK! Updated.


On April 8, 2010, asteroid 2010 GA6 will pass within the Moon’s orbit around the Earth at a miss distance of 0.9 mean lunar distances, 0.0024 Astronomical Units, or about 223,094 miles (359,034 km).

Its diameter is estimated to be between about 56 and 125 feet (17 m – 38 m), and its velocity relative to Earth is approximately 25,338 miles per hour
(10.88 km/s)

With an absolute magnitude of 26, you won’t be able to see it with the naked eye.

BTW, this asteroid was discovered April 5th 2010.

It is expected to POSSIBLY impact the Earth on April 6, 2074.



Update: 4/8/10
JPL has revised their orbital plots and they no longer list an impact in 2074, nor even a close approach on that date. They also have changed the date of this year's close approach to tomorrow, 4/9/10, instead of today. But it will still pass inside of the moon's orbit, only about 223K miles away. Now why was the original estimate so far off? I can only presume it was because they only had 19 observations to work from and the error band was still pretty huge. Either that or it really will hit us in 2074 and they don't want to cause a panic...=b

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