Sat Mar 23, 2024 11:33 pm by globalturbo
https://youtu.be/b0xm1YiQUtE
nemesis maturity
Published on Dec 23, 2018
The December 2018 close approach by the large, near-Earth asteroid 2003 SD220 has provided astronomers an outstanding opportunity to obtain detailed radar images of the surface and shape of the object and to improve the understanding of its orbit. The asteroid flew past Earth on Saturday, Dec. 22, at a distance of about 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers). This was the asteroid's closest approach in more than 400 years and the closest until 2070, when the asteroid will safely approach Earth slightly closer. The radar images reveal an asteroid with a length of at least one mile (1.6 kilometers) and a shape similar to that of the exposed portion of a hippopotamus wading in a river. They were obtained Dec. 15-17 by coordinating the observations with NASA's 230-foot (70-meter) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California, the National Science Foundation's 330-foot (100-meter) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Arecibo Observatory's 1,000-foot (305-meter) antenna in Puerto Rico. The images confirm what was seen in earlier "light curve" measurements of sunlight reflected from the asteroid and from earlier radar images by Arecibo: 2003 SD220 has an extremely slow rotation period of roughly 12 days. It also has what seems to be a complex rotation somewhat analogous to a poorly thrown football. Known as "non-principal axis" rotation, it is uncommon among near-Earth asteroids, most of which spin about their shortest axis. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-12-holiday...
