Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 NJ16 extremely close encounter: a image – 13 May 2024
On 14 May 2024, the near-Earth asteroid 2024 NJ16 will have an extremely close, but safe encounter with our Earth, coming as close as 25.000 km from its center. We captured it while it was approaching us.
See asteroid 2024 JN16 LIVE here!
The image above comes from a single, 180-second exposure, remotely taken with the Celestron C14+Paramount ME+SBIG ST8-XME robotic unit available at Virtual Telescope. The telescope tracked the apparent motion of the asteroid, this is why stars look like long trails while the asteroid is a sharp dot of light.
At the imaging time, asteroid 2024 NJ16 was at about 300.000 km from us, closer than the Moon and it was approaching our planet. The minimum distance (19.000 km from the Earth surface, about 50% of the distance of geostationary satellites) will be reached on 14 May at 09:50 UTC (source: Nasa/JPL)..
This 3.2 – 7.1 meters large asteroid (source: Nasa/JPL) was discovered by G. Borisov on 12 May 2024 and announced the following day. Of course, there are no risks at all for our planet.
We scheduled a live feed to show it in real-time!
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