Near-Earth Asteroid 2010 WC9 very close encounter: an image (11 May 2018)
Next 15 May 2018, the near-Earth asteroid 2010 WC9 will safely have a very close encounter with our planet, coming at about 200.000 km from us, almost half of the average lunar distance. We managed to capture it last night.
Near-Earth Asteroid 2010 WC9: 11 May 2018
The image above comes from the average of three, 180-seconds exposures, remotely taken with “Elena” (PlaneWave 17″+Paramount ME+SBIG STL-6303E) robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, this is why stars show as small trails, while the asteroid looks like a sharp dot of light in the center of the image, marked with two white lines.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2010 WC9 was at about 4.3 millions of km from the Earth and it was on its way approaching us.
This ~90 meters large asteroid will reach its minimum distance (204.000 km) from us next 15 May 2018, at 22:05 UTC. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
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