The flyby is underway dell’asteroide 2011 UL21, among the ten largest to have passed within 7.5 million kilometers of the Earth from 1900 to today. No danger for our planetonly a great show which was broadcast live on the ANSA Science Channel thanks to the robotic telescopes of the Virtual Telescope Project installed in Manciano, near Grosseto.
“Thanks to the purity of the starry sky freest from light pollution in the whole of peninsular Italy, we will be able to image the asteroid which, from a geometric point of view, will be visible even if the ideal conditions for observation are starting tomorrow, June 28th”, says astrophysicist Gianluca Masi, scientific director of the Virtual Telescope.
Asteroid 2011 UL21, discovered on October 17, 2011 from the Catalina Sky Surveythere is a diameter of 2,310 meters and it’s larger than 99% of all known near-Earth objects (NEOs). However it won’t get too close to our planet: will pass to 6.6 million kilometers away17 times farther than the Moon.
Graphic representation of the horizon of asteroid 2011 UL21 (source: Gianluca Masi, The Virtual Telescope)
However, the event is not to be missedas Masi points out. “Analysing the list of close passages by these bodiesmade available by the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (Cneos) of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it can be concluded that, after this rendezvous, 2011 UL21 will be among the top ten largest asteroids that have passed within 7.5 million kilometers of Earth from January 1, 1900 to today”.
Smaller but equally spectacular will be theasteroids 2024 MK who will greet the Earth on June 29th at 3.46pm Italian time: with a diameter between 120 and 260 meterswill move on to 290,000 kilometers from our planet (about 75% of the Earth-Moon distance) “becoming one of the brightest objects of its kind ever seen in recent history“, concludes Masi.
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