Near Earth Asteroid 2007 TU24

Go to http://www.pbase.com/adamstuart/2007_tu24
for some still images. Asteroid 2007 TU24, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 11, 2007 closely approached the Earth to within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) on 2008 Jan. 29 08:33 UT. This object, between 150 and 600 meters in diameter, is moving at approximately 5.8 miles/second and will reach an approximate apparent magnitude 10.3 on Jan. 29-30 before quickly becoming fainter as it moves further from Earth. Given the estimated number of Near-Earth asteroids of this size (about 7,000 discovered and undiscovered objects), an object of this size would be expected to pass this close to Earth, on average, about every 5 years or so. The average interval between actual Earth impacts for an object of this size would be about 37,000 years. For the January 29th encounter, Near Earth asteroid 2007 TU24 has no chance of hitting, or affecting, Earth. I was able to capture this tumbling rock as it zips through space by first downloading an accurate ephemeris from JPL, installing the text file in Software Bisque's TheSky, and slewing my computerized LX200 telescope to the asteroid's location. I included a screen capture of TheSky for each image to illustrate how accurate the software is.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Asteroid
• CCD
• Astrophotography

[photonman1964]

Due to limited data, I assembled the video sequence as follows: 3 repeating clips in a row of TU24 moving through a star field at 18:45 EST, followed by 3 repeating clips of TU24 moving through a star field 9 minutes later (18:54 EST).

Adam