Look Up and Watch a 1.1-km Asteroid Fly Past Earth Today – Here’s How

[Grim Reaper 6]

In a slow moving universe, asteroids give us a rare chance to see things moving in real time. We have such a chance coming right up on the evening of Tuesday, January 18^th, when 1.1-kilometer asteroid (7482) 1994 PC1 passes 1.23 million miles (1.98 million kilometers) from the Earth. This is about five times the distance from the Earth to the Moon, and just a shade over the distance to the anti-sunward Earth-Sun Lagrange 2 point, soon to be the home of the James Webb Space Telescope. Fortunately, both the Earth and said space telescope are safe from the asteroid on this pass, and will remain so for centuries in to the foreseeable future.

The asteroid was discovered on the night of August 9^th, 1994 by astronomer Robert McNaught observing from the Siding Spring Observatory. The Apollo asteroid is an Earth-crosser, with a perihelion interior to our own at 0.9 Astronomical Units (AU) from the Sun, and an aphelion out in the asteroid belt at 1.8 AU, with an orbital period of 572 days. It’s orbital inclination of 33.5 degrees relative to the ecliptic makes it pass far from the Earth on most years.

Look Up and Watch a 1.1-km Asteroid Fly Past Earth Today – Here’s How (scitechdaily.com)