An asteroid as large as nine cruise ships will pass by Earth, May 31 but astronomers assure that there will be no impact on our planet.
This month of May seems to be favorable for sky gazers as they enjoy visual treats one after the other. After witnessing the biggest meteor crash into moon observed by the NASA lunar impact team, astronomy enthusiasts will soon have the opportunity to witness the passing of an asteroid that is as large as nine cruise ships. Though the asteroid will pass our planet at a distance of approximately 3.6 million miles, which is 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon, its large size will make it visible to sky gazers.
"Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be an outstanding radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo and we expect to obtain a series of high-resolution images that could reveal a wealth of surface features," said radar astronomer Lance Benner, the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a press release. "Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin. We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid's distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise."
The asteroid, which is reportedly 2.7 kilometers long, has been given its name by the NASA-supported Minor Planet Center in Cambridge. It was discovered August 19, 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program near Socorro, New Mexico.
"It is tremendously exciting to see detailed images of this asteroid for the first time," said Benner. "With radar we can transform an object from a point of light into a small world with its own unique set of characteristics. In a real sense, radar imaging of near-Earth asteroids is a fundamental form of exploring a whole class of solar system objects."
