Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (465824) 2010 FR close encounter: an image – 3 Sept. 2020
Next 6 Sept. 2020, the potentially hazardous asteroid (465824) 2010 FR will have a relatively close and absolutely safe encounter with our planet. It will come as close as 7.5 millions of km, so about 19 times the average lunar distance. We captured it a few hours ago.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (465824) 2010 FR. 3 Sept. 2020
The image above comes from a single 480-seconds exposure, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope carefully tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, so stars result in long trails, while the asteroid looks like a sharp dot of light in the center of the image. It is marked by an arrow. The full Moon was not far in the sky, so the image was taken under less-than-ideal conditions: despite this, asteroid 2010 FR is well visible.
At the imaging time, asteroid (465824) 2010 FR was at about 7.8 millions of km from the Earth and it was slowly approaching us.It was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on 18 Mar. 2010.
This 120 -270 meters large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (about 7.5 millions of km) from us on 6 Sept. 2020, at 08:38 UTC. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
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