Potentially Hazardous Asteroid 2024 ON close encounter: an image (9 Sept. 2024).
We captured the potentially hazardous asteroid 2024 ON again, while it is safely coming as close as one million of km from us, 2.6 times the average lunar distance.
The image above comes from the average of two, 120-second exposures, 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 ON was at about 5.8 million of km from our planet and approaching.
This 220-480 m large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (about 1 million of km, 2.6 times the average lunar distance) from us on 17 Sept. 2024, at 10:19 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL). Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
We will show this asteroid live on 15 Sept. 2024!
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