giant asteroid near Earth's Moon

He rushes giant asteroid near Earth's Moon next week

He rushes giant asteroid near Earth's A huge asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will approach our planet's past next week, flying from Earth to orbit the moon when flying on Tuesday (08 November).

The space rock, an asteroid named 2005 YU55, not a threat to Earth, but it will be observed by astronomers around the world excited. It is 1,300 feet (400 meters) wide at all, and more black than coal, NASA scientists.

At its closest point, the asteroid 2005 YU55 happen to the Earth at a distance of about 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers on Tuesday at 6:28 pm EST (2328 GMT). The average distance between the Moon and Earth is approximately 238,854 miles (384,399 km).

"This is particularly out because it is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has this happened close to the Earth," said Scott Fisher, program director of the Division of Astronomical Sciences NSF in a NSF webchat Thursday (November 3.) organized by ScienceNOW. "It gives us a great (and rare!) The opportunity to study a near-Earth object in this way. In fact, we have several telescopes set up and ready to observe this event now."
The telescopes include the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and various instruments of the NASA Deep Space Network, to name a few.

Astronomers plan to use the telescope to adjust the radar images of asteroid 2005 YU55 similar to one taken by the Arecibo Observatory in April 2010 when the space rock flew within 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km ) from Earth. Tuesday's flyby, however, is much closer and should enable astronomers to pressure more detailed images of the asteroid. [Photos: Asteroids in deep space]

Observatories in Hawaii will also try to make spectroscopic measurements of the asteroid to analyze its composition, the researchers said.

As its name implies, the asteroid 2005 YU55 was discovered in 2005 and orbits the Sun in an elliptical path that extends from inside the orbit of Venus outside the orbit of Mars, scientists said. The asteroid completes a trip around the sun every 15 months. Moon next week