Thursday, April 29, 2010

Two different kinds of PDA

I never realized there were two different kinds of PDA.

This is the more familiar one:

















And this is the other kind:

This PDA is a "potentially dangerous asteroid", known as 2005 YU55. On April 19, it swung by us about 2.4 million km out.

According to Space.com:

"On Nov. 8, 2011, the asteroid will complete another trip around the sun and swing by Earth again just inside the moon's orbit. It should fly by at a distance of 191,120 miles (307,577 km), about eight-tenths the distance between Earth and the moon. The distance from Earth to the moon is on average about 238,900 miles (384,472 km)."

How big is this PDA? About 400 meters or so. The image is from Arecibo, which helped determine that it was a bit bigger than previously thought.


While it doesn't appear that this one has Earth in the cross-hairs, if one this size smacked us, it'd leave a mark.

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