There was a great deal of excitement from yesterday’s cosmically close shave as 3-mile-wide asteroid 4179 Toutatis zipped by the Earth. If you missed the action, we’ve rounded up some of the best images and videos from the event.
Toutatis is a long, irregularly shaped object that swings by Earth about once every four years, usually coming within a few million miles of our planet. The asteroid is officially classified as “potentially hazardous” but has very little chance of actually hitting the Earth. Astronomers have calculated that its odds of crashing into our planet over the next 600 years are effectively zero. This year’s pass brought Toutatis within about 3.7 million miles of Earth, roughly 15 times the Earth-moon distance, though the next flyby, in late 2016, will be at a more comfortable 23 million miles. The asteroid won’t get close again until 2069, when it be around 1.8 million miles from Earth.
Toutatis makes people realize that gigantic rocks zoom by our planet fairly regularly. Given its size — about half as big as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs — and its close proximity, the asteroid gives us all a little scare wondering if and when we could be hit from space. Fortunately, NASA is on the case with its Near Earth Object program and the Spaceguard Survey, which has found and monitored about 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids larger than a half mile. A private non-profit organization named the B612 Foundation has also announced plans to be on the lookout for killer asteroids, cataloging everything larger than 500 feet wide in the vicinity of our planet.
If we do find a large and deadly rock headed our way, there are various ways to reroute the object, including nuking it, shooting it with lasers, pushing it with a small spacecraft, or tugging it with a giant space lasso. Perhaps one of these awesome plans will one day save the planet. In the meantime, we can all stop fretting about the end of the world.
We may see a few more images soon since the Chinese spacecraft Chang’e 2 is scheduled to visit Toutatis on Dec. 13. Chang'e 2 launched from Earth in 2010 and flew around the moon, conducting research from orbit. After completing its primary mission, the probe was rerouted toward Toutatis in April 2012.
NASA has been watching Toutatis closely with radar telescopes from its Goldstone Observatory in California. The above image shows the asteroid around its closest approach on Dec. 11. The two images, taken a few hours apart, show a small amount of rotation.
Toutatis From Earth
A short video sequence showing the bright white dot of Toutatis flying through a field of stars, as seen from a telescope in the Canary Islands on Earth. The film comes from the Slooh Space Camera consortium, which offered free live feeds of the asteroid passing by our planet. The feed was so popular that it briefly crashed their Google+ hangout.
Video: Slooh Space Camera
The irregular potato shape of Toutatis can be seen in these two images, taken on Dec. 9. Because of the object’s elongated shape and the radar shadow it casts, the lower part of the image appears almost disconnected from the top even though they are all one piece.