A space rock’s nearby way to deal with Earth this Christmas has uncovered it to be comparable fit as a fiddle to a “hippopotamus swimming in a waterway”, as indicated by NASA.
The item, called 2003 SD220, is presently the nearest to Earth it has been in 400 years, NASA said.
It securely gone by the planet last Saturday at 2.9 million kilometers away — around seven and a half occasions the separation from the Earth to the Moon.
Credits: Space.com
It will next return to Earth in 2070, at a somewhat closer range.
Three profound space interchanges offices assembled new information on the space rock more than three days from December 15, uncovering its shape and surface and giving stargazers a superior comprehension of its circle, NASA said.
The pictures are multiple times more nitty gritty than past readings of the space rock.
The ‘hippo’ is 1.6 kilometers long and has a “to a great degree moderate pivot” of around 12 days, the space organization said.
“It additionally has what is by all accounts a mind boggling pivot to some degree undifferentiated from an ineffectively tossed football,” NASA said in an announcement.
The radar pictures of the space rock, taken utilizing one recieving wire to transmit and another to get, are practically identical in detail to a shuttle flyby, for example, when NASA’s OSIRIS-REx took photographs not long ago of space rock Bennu, the office said.
Source: Time Magazine and ABC News
