One of the neat things about this asteroid is that it is one of the few that have their own moons. A rock about 2,000 feet long orbits 1998 QE2, and in radar images, it appears brighter than the asteroid itself because it rotates a lot slower, which compresses the returning radar signal into only a small chunk of pixels, concentrating it into a bright patch in the image.
01 June 2013
Close encounters of the rocky kind
Considering all of the apocalyptic "threats" that have occurred in the past few years, I'm surprised that none of the crackpots picked yesterday's asteroid passing to play on. The 1.7-mile asteroid, named QE2, was discovered in August 1998 by MIT's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program in Socorro, New Mexico. An asteroid of this size, should it hit Earth, would be catastrophic, but at its closest yesterday around 5pm Eastern time, it was still 15 times farther away than the moon, so there was no chance of it hitting us.
One of the neat things about this asteroid is that it is one of the few that have their own moons. A rock about 2,000 feet long orbits 1998 QE2, and in radar images, it appears brighter than the asteroid itself because it rotates a lot slower, which compresses the returning radar signal into only a small chunk of pixels, concentrating it into a bright patch in the image.
Despite NASA's decrease in funding, more asteroid-related programming is planned for the future, including a possible manned mission to lasso one for research, so stay tuned.
One of the neat things about this asteroid is that it is one of the few that have their own moons. A rock about 2,000 feet long orbits 1998 QE2, and in radar images, it appears brighter than the asteroid itself because it rotates a lot slower, which compresses the returning radar signal into only a small chunk of pixels, concentrating it into a bright patch in the image.
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