Mar 19 2009
Asteroid 2009 FH - Another Flyby!
Here we go again, another asteroid flyby! Two within one months’ time – umm, I wonder what is going in the heavens above. On March 2nd, we were buzzed by asteroid 2009 DD45 as it whizzed on by, it was only discovered on the previous Friday, the 27th of February. This was a 200 foot wide rock – astronomers think it might be affected by the gravitational pull of the Earth and it could return for a future visit.
On March 18th, we had another close encounter as asteroid 2009 FH buzzed on by at 85,000 kilometers away, or little more than the twice the distance of a geosynchronous communications satellite. As with the previous asteroid, there was no concern for a collision and astronomers will be tracking it. You can follow along with the track by visiting the NASA site for the orbital elements:
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi?find_body=1&body_group=sb&sstr=2009%20FH
Asteroid image by Eric Allen
Quite a few near misses all of a sudden! It will be interesting to see if this will be a trend.
Definitely an interesting thought. If it becomes a trend, I’d wonder why; it seems odd that there would suddenly be a mess of asteroids coming in, even at safe angles. How do you go about figuring out if there’s something going on out there that you should know about, when there’s so much “out there” to look into?
Thanks folks for stopping by and sharing your comments. Tracking these things as well as the ’space junk’ is quite a task - they almost have to operate like an air traffic control center. I get alerts when objects are detected and will update with new info when I get it.