Next week (Feb 15) the earth will be visited by asteroid 2012 DA14
passing inside the gestationary satellite orbits. To quote from
http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/2012DA14/2012DA14_planning.html,
2012 DA14 was discovered by the La Sagra Sky Survey in Spain on February 23,
2012.
This object will make an extremely close approach to within 0.00023 AU of Earth
at
19:25 UT (11:25 AM PST) on February 15, 2013. That is only 0.09 lunar
distances or 5.4 Earth
radii from the center of the Earth. The close approach will be about 28000 km
above Earth's
surface. That's inside the distance to geosynchronous satellites but thousands
of kilometers
above the elevation for low-Earth-orbit spacecraft such as the International
Space Station.
At the time of closest approach, the asteroid will move about 0.8 degrees per
minute.
There is considerable interest in the astronomy community over plans to
do radar tracking of the asteroid. The Goldstone 70M dish will be
running MAX QRO with 435 kW.
73 de Tom, K3IO
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