Get out your telescopes! Two small asteroids will come within moon distance of Earth Wednesday.
The first, asteroid 2010 RX30, will come within 154,100 miles of Earth -- about 60 percent of the Earth-moon distance -- at 5:51 a.m. EDT (1251 UT). This asteroid is estimated to be about 42 feet across.
The second, 2010 RF12, will come almost 12 hours later, at 5:12 p.m. EDT (0012 UT Thursday). It will swing by Earth at just 20 percent the Earth-moon distance, or 47,845 miles. 2010 RF12 is even smaller, only about 23 feet across.
Both were just discovered Sept. 5 by astronomer Andrea Boattini, working with a 1.5-meter reflecting telescope at Mount Lemmon in Arizona as part of the Catalina Sky Survey's routine scanning of the skies.
According to NASA's Near-Earth Object impact risk tables, the odds that 2010 RF12 will hit the Earth are about 1 in 50, and the odds of an impact with 2010 RX30 are less than 1 in 1,000. Both objects are too small to do much damage even if they were to smack into the Earth: Much of their rocky mass probably wouldn't survive the trip through Earth's atmosphere.
Because of their small sizes, they won't be visible with the naked eye. But they should be bright enough to observe with a modest-size telescope, according to the Near-Earth Object Program.
The two asteroids are on unrelated orbits. The fact that they're scheduled to arrive so close to each other is purely a cosmic coincidence.
Via SpaceWeather.com
Images: 1) Asteroid Ida as imaged by the Galileo spacecraft in 1993. Credit: NASA
2) Orbits of 2010 RF12 and 2010 RX30 from JPL's Small-Body Database Browser
See Also:
- Wednesday's Near-Earth Asteroid Caught on Film
- Earth to Get Close Shave Wednesday From Newly Discovered Asteroid
- How to Defend Earth Against an Asteroid Strike
- Video: The Asteroid That Will Almost Hit Earth
- The Real Twitpocalypse: Asteroid Alerts Come to Twitter
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