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IRON AND ICE
Dangerous Asteroid Safely Flies Past Earth
by Staff Writers
Moscow, Russia (RIA Novosti) Jan 14, 2010


Orbital diagram depicts the trajectory of asteroid 2010 AL30 during its flyby of Earth in the early morning hours of Jan. 13. Image credit: NASA/JPL

An asteroid named 2010 AL30 whose unusual orbit frightened astronomers two days ago safely flew past Earth at a distance of 130,000 km (80,796 miles) on Wednesday.

The asteroid some 10-15 meters long with parameters similar to a man-made object was discovered by the LINEAR survey of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories last Sunday.

"The asteroid posed no danger anyway," said astronomer Leonid Yelenin from the Moscow-based Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. He classified asteroids of over 100 meters in diameter as being dangerous.

Yelenin said the theory about the artificial origins of 2010 AL30 was unlikely to be confirmed.

"Its orbital period is equal to the time Earth orbits the sun. A strange orbit - they thought at first it was a man-made object - a rocket booster, but this has not been confirmed," he said.

Alan Harris, senior researcher at the U.S. Space Science Institute said on Tuesday the object had a "perfectly ordinary Earth-crossing orbit."

"Unlikely to be artificial, its orbit doesn't resemble any useful spacecraft trajectory, and its encounter velocity with Earth is not unusually low," he said.

Yelenin also said the calculations were not quite exact: the asteroid that was expected to come closest to Earth at about 12:48 GMT did so at 06:45 GMT.

Source: RIA Novosti

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Related Links
Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics
Asteroid and Comet Mission News, Science and Technology






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IRON AND ICE
Rosetta's OSIRIS Cameras Reveal The Nature Of Asteroid Steins
Paris, France (ESA) Jan 13, 2010
Close-up images of asteroid (2867) Steins, obtained with the OSIRIS cameras on Rosetta, have provided extensive new measurements of the physical properties of this main-belt asteroid. Steins is revealed to be a loosely-bound 'rubble pile' whose diamond shape has been honed by the YORP effect. This is the first time this effect has been seen in a main-belt asteroid. The results are reported by H. Uwe Keller and colleagues in the 8 January issue of Science magazine. ... read more


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