Placing things in perspective - 2015 TB145

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Say hello to 2015 TB145. Never heard of it? Nobody had until it was discovered two weeks ago.

From NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab:

2015 TB145
2015 TB145 was discovered on 2015 Oct 10 by the Pan-STARRS I survey.  The object will approach the Earth within 0.00326 au (1.3 Lunar distances or about 490 000 km) on 2015 Oct 31 at about 16:57 UT (9:57 AM PDT).  The asteroid is in an extremely eccentric (~0.86) and high inclination (~40 deg) orbit.  It has a Tisserand parameter of 2.937 hinting that it may be cometary in nature.  Its absolute magnitude of 19.8 indicates that its diameter is probably within a factor of two of 320 meters.  At closest approach the SNRs/run at DSS-14 are expected to be over 20000, so this should be one of the best radar targets of the year.  We hope to obtain images with a range resolution as high as 2 m/pixel using DSS-13 to transmit and Green Bank (and possibly Arecibo) to receive.  The flyby presents a truly outstanding scientific opportunity to study the physical properties of this object.

The encounter velocity is 35 km/s, which is unusually high. 

This is the closest approach by a known object this large until 1999 AN10 approaches within 1 lunar distance in August 2027.  The last approach closer than this by an object with H < 20 was by 2004 XP14 in July 2006 at 1.1 lunar distances. 

A city-buster that we only discovered two weeks ago. What else is lurking out there?

Stuff like this sure puts our own problems into perspective...

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on October 23, 2015 5:11 PM.

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