Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 RN3 close encounter: an image – 9 Sept. 2024
On 9 Sept. 2024, the near-Earth asteroid 2024 RN3 had a safe close encounter with the Earth, coming as close as 684.000 km, about 1,8 times the average lunar distance. We observed it at the time of its fly-by.
Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 RN3: 9 Sept. 2024.
The image above comes from a single 120-second exposure, remotely taken with the “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″ + Paramount MEII + SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available as part of the Virtual Telescope Project. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, so it looks like a sharp dot of light, indicated with a white arrow, while stars leave bright streaks on the background.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2024 RN3 was at about 684.000 km from us, its minimum distance from the Earth.
This 14-31 m large asteroid reached its minimum distance (about 684.000 km from the center of the Earth, 1.8 times the average lunar distance) from us on 9 Sept. 2024, at 19:55 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL). Of course, there were no risks at all for our planet.
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