[meteorite-list] Digital Movie Shows Awesome Speed of Asteroid Close Approach (2002 NY40)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:52:19 2004
Message-ID: <200208211830.LAA16781_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr02/pr0207.html

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, August 21, 2002
RELEASE NO: NOAO 02-07

Digital Movie Shows Awesome Speed of Asteroid Close Approach

For More Information:

Douglas Isbell
Public Information Officer
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Phone: 520/318-8214
E-mail: disbell_at_noao.edu

Jacqueline Weaver
Yale News Office
Phone: 203 /432-8555
E-mail: jacqueline.weaver_at_yale.edu

Students from Yale University used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak
National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002
NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before its close flyby of Earth.

These images have been turned into a short digital movie that clearly
demonstrates the impressive speed of 2002 NY40 as seen from Earth over a
period of about two hours. The movie is available for downloading at the
following Web site:

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr02/pr0207.html

Yale undergraduate student Brandy Heflin and graduate student Bing Zhao were
at the 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak conducting research on exotic binary
stars when they decided to interrupt their work to observe this unique
event. A consortium of universities took over operation of the 0.9-meter
telescope from the National Science Foundation last March, in order to give
their students more hands-on research time.

"These unplanned observations reflect the exact reasons that the university
partnership took over operational responsibility for the telescope," said
astronomer Charles Bailyn, Heflin and Zhao's research mentor at Yale. "They
took me a bit by surprise, but we want to encourage students to take the
initiative, and they did a very nice job. There is also some real science to
be gleaned from these observations, in terms of brightness fluctuations and
the rotational period of the asteroid."

2002 NY40 crossed an area of the sky about equal to the full Moon during the
time period of the movie, traveling northwest through the constellation
Aquarius. Two nights later, during its closest approach to Earth, the
asteroid was moving across the sky about 20 times faster.

Discovered on July 14, asteroid 2002 NY40 has an estimated diameter of 700
meters (0.43 miles). It passed safely by Earth on the night of August 17-18
at a distance of approximately 524,000 kilometers (326,000 miles), about 1.3
times the distance from Earth to the Moon.

For the sake of comparison, if a person were riding on the asteroid and
looking back toward Earth during its close passage, our planet would have
appeared nearly three times larger on the sky than the Moon does from Earth.

A long-exposure image of the asteroid taken at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope
on the night of August 17 by Hillary Mathis showed no obvious evidence that
2002 NY40 is a binary asteroid, a possibility being investigated by radio
telescopes and other observatories.

The digital movie of 2002 NY40 was created by the staff of the Public
Affairs & Educational Outreach department at the National Optical Astronomy
Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, AZ.

More information about the Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO (WIYN) consortium's
operation of the 0.9-meter telescope is available at:

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr01/pr0107.html

Participants in the 0.9-meter consortium include Indiana University, San
Francisco State University, the University of Florida, Wesleyan University
and four University of Wisconsin campuses

NOAO is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in
Astronomy (AURA), Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the National
Science Foundation. NOAO operates telescopes at Kitt Peak National
Observatory near Tucson, AZ, and Cerro Tololo Inter-american Observatory
near La Serena, Chile, and it is the U.S. partner in the International
Gemini Observatory.
Received on Wed 21 Aug 2002 02:30:30 PM PDT