Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (138971) 2001 CB21 close encounter: image and video – 23 Feb. 2022
We spotted potentially hazardous asteroid (138971) 2001 CB21 again last night. Here we present our latest image and video.
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (138971) 2001 CB21: 23 Feb. 2022.
The image above comes from a single 120-second exposure, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, so it looks like a sharp dot, with surrounding stars appearing slightly elongated. On the upper left, stars of the globular cluster NGC 5466 are also visible.
At the imaging time, asteroid (138971) 2001 CB21 was at about 10 millions of km from the Earth and it was slowly approaching us. It was discovered by the LINEAR survey on 2 Feb. 2001.
We also did the time-lapse below, using all the images (139) collected during our imaging session:
Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (138971) 2001 CB21: a time-lapse – 23 Feb. 2022.
This 560 – 1300 meters large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (about 4.9 millions of km, 13 times the average lunar distance) from us on 4 Mar. 2022, at 07:59 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL). Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
* See potentially hazardous asteroid (138971) 2011 CB21 live! *
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