NASA radar spots asteroid 2014 JO25 prior to flyby – See pic

Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR

New Delhi: NASA has released radar images of asteroid 2014 JO25 obtained in the early morning hours on Tuesday, with NASA's 70-meter (230-foot) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California.

At the time, asteroid 2014 JO25 was 1.9 million miles (3 million kilometers) from Earth.

The images obtained prior to its flyby Earth on Wednesday, April 19, reveal a peanut-shaped asteroid that rotates about once every five hours and have resolutions as fine as 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel.

Asteroid 2014 JO25 will fly safely past Earth on Wednesday at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon.

Radar has been used to observe hundreds of asteroids. When these small, natural remnants of the formation of the solar system pass relatively close to Earth, deep space radar is a powerful technique for studying their sizes, shapes, rotation, surface features, and roughness, and for more precise determination of their orbital path.

Asteroid 2014 JO25 was discovered in May 2014 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona .