It orbits the sun once every 15 months. It's a dark, rocky body similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that have fallen to Earth. These are very ancient carbon and clay-rich fragments of asteroids from the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
On November 8 at p. Around the same time, the moon will be , miles from the asteroid. There is zero chance of an impact on either body. The asteroid's orbit is well known and nothing would suggest it's going to veer from the predicted path.
It's like taking the train to work; you're confident it will travel from point A to point B without jumping the rails to another track. The asteroid poses no threat to our planet for at least the next years. Even today, YU55 is in the daylight sky in the direction of the sun, which is why we can't see it.
As it approaches Earth on the 8th, it will emerge from the sun's direction, sweep broadside across our orbit and then recede beyond the Earth-moon system. You can best understand how it moves by a little thought experiment.
Imagine waiting at a street corner at night for a car to pass. We first see its headlights in the distance as the vehicle approaches the intersection from several blocks away. The closer it gets, the faster it seems to move and the brighter the headlights appear. As it passes by and drives into the distance, we can still watch the car for many blocks assuming a straight road until its tail lights finally fade away in the distance.
Although the asteroid will be too faint to see without a telescope, scientists will be studying it closely to learn about its orbit and composition. Its trajectory will also be tracked by radar using ground-based antennae in California and Puerto Rico. Asteroids such as YU55 can provide clues about the formation of the Solar System, including the Earth.
Jay Tate, director of the Spaceguard Centre, an independent observatory and research facility near Knighton, Powys, said: "We will want to tell what the surface composition of the asteroid is. By learning what it is made of we can question a great deal of what we know about how the planet is formed. The YU55 asteroid will miss the Earth by , miles - a small distance in astronomical terms, although experts say there is no danger of the object hitting the planet.
The asteroid is said to be meters in diameter. How is it that so closely resembles a sphere? Chicknlady's comment about an asteroid impact causing a Lunar Orbital change raises another question. What if an asteroid or other large object struck the Moon? What the ejecta from the impact send a volley of Lunar material hurtling toward the Earth? Is it possible for any part of this asteroid to break apart from the main body?
Is there any possibility for a smaller piece of YU55 to hurl toward our moon or our planet? I suspect that the image obtained from the flyby is not a true image of how the asteroid would look in the sky, but a plot of returned signal strength plotted against time increasing as we go down and frequency left to right. Increasing time will represent returns initially from the part of the asteroid nearest us and then extending towards the limb in all directions.
Increasing frequency will represent returns from the receding limb extending across the face to the approaching limb. Bright reflective features on the asteroid will show up in the radar image, but you can't unambiguously locate them on the asteroid.
I recall back in the s, before they did radar interferometry, radar images like this were made of Venus. This time, of course, with the added antennas at Goldstone and elsewhere acting as an interferometer, a true image of the asteroid will be obtained.
Hi to everyone! Im from Portugal and im new here and i would like that someone help me because i would like to see the yu55 here in Portugal. Could someone tell me what time of the 8 of november will pass here and where i should looking? Thank you very much!! To prepare for observing in advance, you need to set the program time in RTGUI to a few hours before you will begin observing the asteroid say, hours local on Nov.
Make sure you check the box "Near Earth Object," that way you can use a non-real time starting time. For the name enter YU55, and press OK. You'll download a file from the Minor Planet Center, with both an object name and a starting time in the filename. This file can only be used during the hour period you specify, but you will have minute-by-minute positions for the asteroid that will update automatically, and you can use your Goto function at any time if you connect your telescope to your computer.
Probably you will be able to see the asteroid moving against the background of stars. Why is the radar image of asteroid YU55 cresent shaped, as if lit up by the sun? Me encuentro en Lima Peru , quisiera saber hacia donde tengo que dirigir el telescopio para poder apreciar el asteroide yu Gracias por la ayuda. If YU55 passes so close to both Earth and Venus, it might be on or evolving towards the Hoohmann minimum energy trajectory. Hohmann invented this trajectory to get from one planet to another.
Interesting if YU55 is on this trajectory but there is a psrecedent; it used to be called TC 3, but it crashed into the Earth and is now displayed somewhere in Sudan as the Almahata Sitta meteorite, an historically significant object being the fisrt meteorite observed and tracked in space prior to impact. With two examples of close encounters from asteroids on the Hohmann minimum energy trajectory, one has to wonder if maybe it is a chaos attractor?
If so, possibly such orbits might be monitored. As chicknlady's post got me thinking, it's rather a shame in a way that this object doesn't collide with the moon.
The possibilities of what the impact could turn up would no doubt help us learn a little bit more about our closest neighbor. It'd also be one hell of a show in the sky!
Stars down to Attempt UT. Haven't seen actual magnitude vs time data. Maybe phase hadn't reached brightest before I gave up and looked at the moon and Jupiter. It was fun to get outside anyway. My suggestion is that Earth should send a rocket to this thing, at the next good opportunity and alter its orbit enough that it plows into Venus, providing some wonderful science and ridding ourselves of that little nuisance.
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