Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 XS16 extremely close encounter: an image – 11 Dec. 2024
On 11 Dec. 2024, the near-Earth asteroid 2024 XS16 safely came extremely close to our Earth, coming as close as 48.000 km from its center, a bit more than geostationary satellites. We captured it while it was approaching us and waiting for an official designation.
Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 XS16: 11 Dec. 2024.
The image above comes from a single, 7-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, extremely fast motion (650”/minute) 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 XS16 was at about 134.000 km from us, 35% of the average lunar distance, and it was approaching our planet. The minimum distance (48.000 km from the Earth center, about 13% of the average lunar distance) was reached on 11 Dec. at 22:16 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL).
This 2 – 5 meters large asteroid (source: Nasa/JPL) was discovered by Mt. Lemmon Survey on 11 Dec. 2024 and announced the following day. Of course, there were no risks at all for our planet.
We scheduled a live feed to show it in real-time!
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