Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 TL2 extremely close encounter: a image – 5 Oct. 2024

On 6 October 2024, the near-Earth asteroid 2024 TL safely came extremely close to our Earth, coming as close as 105.000 km from its center. We captured it while it was approaching us.

Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 TL2: 5 Oct. 2024.

Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 TL2: 5 Oct. 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, this is why stars look like long trails while the asteroid is a sharp dot of light, indicated by a white arrow.

At the imaging time, asteroid 2024 TL2 was at about 340.000 km from us, already closer than the Moon and it was approaching our planet. The minimum distance (105.000 km from the Earth surface, about 27% of the average lunar distance) was reached on 6 October. at 09:12 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL).

This 2 – 4,5 meters large asteroid (source: Nasa/JPL) was discovered by Mt. Lemmon Survey on 4 October 2024 and announced the following day. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.

We scheduled a live feed to show it in real-time!

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