Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently tracked two asteroids, 2024 MK and 2011 UL21, that safely passed by Earth. They noted that one of them had a small moon orbiting it.
According to NASA, asteroid 2011 UL21 passed Earth on June 27 at a distance of 4.1 million miles (6.6 million km), or nearly 17 times the distance of the moon. UL21 was found in 2011 in Tucson, Arizona, by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey.
NASA announced that scientists at JPL using the 70-meter-wide Goldstone Solar System Radar, called Deep Space Station 14 (DSS-14), near Barstow, California, have discovered that the asteroid is roughly spherical and forms a binary star system with a smaller asteroid, or moon, orbiting it about 3 kilometers (2 miles) away.
Lance Benner, JPL's chief scientist who co-led the observations, said: “About two-thirds of asteroids of this size are thought to be binary systems, and their discovery is especially important because we can use measurements of their relative positions to estimate their orbits, masses, and densities, providing important information about how they might have formed,” as cited in the JPL blog post.
Speaking of the other observed asteroid 2024 MK, which was discovered just 13 days earlier and made its closest approach to Earth in a relatively rare way.
NASA's JPL also revealed in a blog post that the same group of scientists spotted asteroid 2024 MK passing close to Earth on June 29 at a distance of just 183,000 miles (295,000 kilometers), which is just over three-quarters of the distance between the moon and Earth.
“This was an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the physical properties and obtain detailed images of a near-Earth asteroid,” Benner said. Just 13 days ago, on June 16, the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) at the Sutherland Observation Station in South Africa made the first identification of asteroid 2024 MK.
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Published: Jul 10, 2024, 12:54 PM IST