Asteroid To Cross Earth-Moon Orbit

Wired:

An asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier is to soar past the Earth this week and, while NASA is certain that the space rock will not hit us, it will be our closest encounter with such a large chunk of rock in three decades.

The 400-yard-wide asteroid is called 2005 YU55 and at the point of closest approach it will graze our planet at 201,700 miles — about 10 percent closer to Earth than the Moon’s typical orbit.

It is the “closest approach by an asteroid, that large, that we’ve known about in advance,” said principal investigator Lance Benner, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in an educational announcement. This gives the space agency an unprecedented view of such a rare flyby — and it will take full advantage.

NASA will track 2005 YU55 from the Deep Space Network at Goldstone, California, and provide radar observations from the Arecibo Planetary Radar Facility in Puerto Rico. This should reveal a wealth of detail about the asteroid’s surface features, shape, and dimensions.

They have an explanatory graphic at the site.