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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday August 12 2017, @05:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the duck-just-in-case dept.

2012 TC4 will pass Earth well within the Moon's orbit a month from now, but not nearly as close as previously estimated:

Mark your calendar for Oct. 12. That's when asteroid 2012 TC4 will slip past Earth at an expected distance of around 27,300 miles (44,000 kilometers). The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile recently caught sight of the asteroid, which could be up to 100 feet (30 meters) in size.

NASA is leading a coordinated international campaign to observe TC4. In July, NASA suggested the asteroid could squeeze in as close as 4,200 miles (6,800 kilometers), but the European Space Agency's latest estimates give us more breathing room.

Geostationary equatorial orbit (GEO) is at about 35,786 km above mean sea level.

Also at Phys.org (AFP).


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:35PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday August 13 2017, @08:35PM (#553354)

    I think they calculate cones, then quote the close side of the cone within some confidence interval... thus the news tends to get better most of the time.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Sulla on Monday August 14 2017, @09:54PM

    by Sulla (5173) on Monday August 14 2017, @09:54PM (#553853) Journal

    When I was in college I had a lab class that took snapshots of rock locations and used a program to track the possible future locations. It did end up looking like an arcing cone. It was a pretty cool class and some of my classmates got their report published and got some sort of cool NASA acknowledgement for correctly predicting their rock hitting Mars. Mine did piss all forever hanging out in the belt.

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