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Asteroid's 230-Foot Moon Discovered as It's Flying by Earth

Asteroid's 230-Foot Moon Discovered as It's Flying by Earth
Photo of jpl.nasa.gov web page shows asteroid 2004 BL86, which safely flew past Earth on Jan. 26, 2015. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

By    |   Wednesday, 28 January 2015 07:06 AM EST

An asteroid flying near Earth this week was discovered to have its own moon measuring 230 feet across.

The asteroid, whose primary body is approximately 1,100 feet across, was captured using radar imaging by the Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California on Monday.

That same day, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory posted a video of the binary system to Twitter created from the 20 individual images captured.


According to NASA, the asteroid — known as "2004 BL86" — flew closest to our planet at 11:19 a.m. EST on Monday. The asteroid and its moon were roughly 745,000 miles from our planet at their closest point — which is 3.1 times the distance from Earth to our moon. In its orbit around the sun, the asteroid won't come any closer for the next two centuries. The next asteroid of a similar size won't fly as close to earth until 2027 (asteroid 1999 AN10).

Just days before the anticipated fly-by, the space agency tweeted out a video illustrating where the orbits of Earth and the asteroid nearly intersect as they travel around the sun.


Asteroid 2004 BL86 was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey in White Sands, New Mexico on Jan. 30, 2004.

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TheWire
An asteroid flying near Earth this week was discovered to have its own moon measuring 230 feet across.
asteroid, 230-foot, moon, discover, earth
246
2015-06-28
Wednesday, 28 January 2015 07:06 AM
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