PICTURES OF THE WEEK: HALLOWEEN ASTEROID
by Hazed
An asteroid whizzed past the Earth on October 31, so it’s been dubbed the Halloween Asteroid. The 600-metre-diameter rock wasn’t close enough to inspire any doomsday panic, since it didn’t come any closer than 1.3 lunar distances – that’s 480,000km.
NASA has published some pictures of the asteroid as it passed us by. They explained, “To obtain these highest-resolution radar images of the asteroid, scientists used the 230-foot (70-meter) DSS-14 antenna at Goldstone, California, to transmit high-power microwaves toward the asteroid. The signal bounced off the asteroid, and its radar echoes were received by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s 100-meter (330-foot) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. The radar images achieve a spatial resolution as fine as 13 feet (4 meters) per pixel.”
The pictures show that the asteroid has “pronounced concavities, bright spots that might be boulders, and other complex features that could be ridges.”
