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Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently tracked two asteroids 2024 MK and 2011 UL21 that safely passed by Earth. Of these, it was observed that one of the asteroids had a small moon orbiting around it.
According to NASA, on June 27, asteroid 2011 UL21 passed 4.1 million miles (6.6 million km) from Earth, which is about 17 times closer than the moon. UL21 was discovered in 2011 by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson, Arizona.
NASA announced that JPL scientists, using the 230-foot-wide (70 meters) Goldstone solar system radar aboard Deep Space Station 14 (DSS-14) near Barstow, California, found that the asteroid is roughly spherical and forms a binary system with a smaller asteroid, or moon, orbiting it at a distance of about 1.9 miles.
Speaking on this, Lance Benner, JPL’s lead scientist who helped lead the observation, said, “About two-thirds of asteroids this size are thought to be binary systems, and their discovery is particularly important because we can use measurements of their relative positions to infer their mutual orbits, masses, and densities, which provide crucial information about how they may have formed,” as quoted in JPL’s blog post.
As for the other observed asteroid, 2024 MK, it was discovered just 13 days ago, and made a relatively rare pass by Earth.
NASA’s JPL also reported in a blog post that on June 29, the same group of scientists observed asteroid 2024 MK pass close to Earth at a distance of just 184,000 miles (295,000 kilometers), a little more than three-quarters of the distance between the Moon and Earth.
“This was an extraordinary opportunity to investigate the physical properties of a near-Earth asteroid and obtain detailed images,” Benner said. Just 13 days earlier, on June 16, the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) at the Sutherland Observation Station in South Africa made a preliminary identification of asteroid 2024 MK.
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Published: July 10, 2024, 12:54 PM IST
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