Huge Asteroid to Fly Past Earth Wednesday

Anna · 27 сен 2004

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/tout...yby_040927.html

The largest asteroid ever known to pass near Earth is making a close celestial brush with the planet this week in an event that professional and backyard astronomers are watching closely.

The space rock, named Toutatis, will not hit Earth, despite rumors of possible doom that have circulated the Internet for months. Humanity is very fortunate there won't be an impact, as the asteroid is large enough to cause global devastation. Toutatis is about 2.9 miles long and 1.5 miles wide (4.6 by 2.4 kilometers).

On Wednesday, Sept. 29 it will be within a million miles of Earth, or about four times the distance to the Moon.

No space rock this big will pass so close in the next century, scientists say. And while similarly large asteroids have hit the planet in the distant past, none so big have come so close since astronomers have had the means to notice them. Many smaller space rocks have been spotted much closer, even inside the orbit of the Moon.

NASA scientists and other asteroid experts have been watching Toutatis for more than a decade, and though its orbit changes slightly with each 4-year trip around the Sun, they have a good handle on the path.

The position of the asteroid on this pass is known to a precision roughly equal to the rock's size, said Alan Harris, a senior research scientist at the Space Science Institute. That leaves a little wiggle room for its exact location at closest approach, but not much.

"Because of the nature of the orbit, we cannot predict thousands of years into the future for this object, but in anyone's lifetime now, there is no chance" of an impact, Harris told SPACE.com.
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Huge Asteroid to Fly Past Earth Wednesday

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Anna Аксакал

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