RenoVous

A special thanks to Taha for pointing us in this direction for today! For comparison, the average distance between Earth and our moon is about 239,000 miles. This widget will always display the next 5 approaches within 4.6 million miles - anything larger than 150 meters within that distance is considered a potential hazard. Here's a look at the projected path of the big asteroid swinging by tomorrow. This asteroid is labeled 163348 (2002 NN4), first observed in July 2002. Towards the end of April, a 1.5 mile wide asteroid called 1998 OR2 passed by Earth, but astronomers were monitoring days before, as it traversed through the Hydra constellation. Credit: Dr. Gianluca Masi (Virtual Telescope Project) The Jet Propulsion Lab in California does much more than watch asteroids though.  Current missions include: ASTER  (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) ASO  (Airborne Snow Observatory) Cloudsat  (P...

CNEOS, NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, monitors the sky for potential hazards.  As we started a new year, four asteroids were detected. At least two of those are Apollo asteroids, which are near-Earth, and have a semi-major axis greater than 1 AU (astronomical unit, roughly the distance from the Earth to the Sun). Aten asteroids, which the other two were, are also near-Earth but have a semi-major axis less than 1 AU. Asteroid 2020 AD was expected to pass about 556,000 miles away - the moon is 238,855 miles away. Next on approach is Asteroid 2019 UO. Article CNEOS 2020 Watch