Near-Earth Asteroid 2022 GN1 very close encounter: image around the fly-by time – 6 Apr. 2022
Early on 6 Apr. 2022, the near-Earth asteroid 2022 GN1 had a very close, but safe encounter with the Earth, coming as close as 126.000 km from its center. We imaged it around the time of its fly-by, sharing the view live with the world.
Near-Earth Asteroid 2022 GN1: 6 Apr. 2022.
The image above comes from a single, 30-second exposure, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″ + Paramount ME + SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the fast apparent motion of the asteroid, this is why stars look like long trails while the asteroid is a sharp dot of light.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2022 GN1 was at about 139.000 km from the telescope and close to its minimum distance from the Earth: the image above was collected 75 minutes before of the nominal close approach.
This 7.2 -16 meters large asteroid (source: Nasa/JPL) was discovered by the Mount Lemmon survey on 4 Apr. 2022. Of course, there were no risks at all for our planet.
We also shared the view with the world, showing 2022 GN1 live on this website; below is the podcast of the event:
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