DON'T PANIC! Asteroid 2005 YU55, 1,300 Feet Wide Will Be Coming Between Earth & The Moon On Approximately November 8...4 Days From Today.

Asteroid 2005 YU55 will zip by Earth next week

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

Reprints & Permissions

A close encounter of the harmless kind comes next Tuesday when an aircraft-carrier-size asteroid races past Earth.

The asteroid, dubbed 2005 YU55, will come within 202,000 miles of Earth, closer than the moon, before zipping farther into space. Carbon-colored and dark, the asteroid measures some 1,300 feet wide. It will be the closest visit by a space rock this size in more than three decades.

"This is not a potentially hazardous asteroid, just a good opportunity to study one," National Science Foundation astronomer Thomas Statler says. NASA and the NSF plan a series of radar telescope and other observations starting Friday, aimed at mapping the asteroid's surface and chemistry.

"The radar measurements should be pretty spectacular," Statler says.

"A lot of asteroids are out there, so the more we know about them, the better," says astronomer Phil Plait of Discover Magazine's BadAstronomer blog. "This one is a clean miss, but we are going to learn a lot of science from it passing by."

read more at...http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/story/2011-11-01/asteroid-viewing-tuesday/51035012/1

Giant Asteroid Hurtles Closer to Earth Than Moon Next Week

By Tariq Malik

Published November 04, 2011

| Space.com

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  NASA/Cornell/Arecibo

In April 2010, this radar image of the near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 was taken by the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. On Nov. 8, 2011, this large space rock zips by Earth again and will be surveyed by radar, visual and infrared equipment.

A huge asteroid about the size of an aircraft carrier will zoom past our planet next week, flying between the Earth and the orbit of the moon when it flies by on Tuesday (Nov. 8).

The space rock, called asteroid 2005 YU55, poses no threat to the Earth but will be observed by excited astronomers around the world. It's about 1,300 feet (400 meters) wide, round and blacker than coal, NASA scientists said.

 

At its closest point, asteroid 2005 YU55 will pass Earth at a range of about 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers on Tuesday at 6:28 p.m. EST (2328 GMT). The average distance between the moon and Earth is about 238,854 miles (384,399 km).

"This is particularly exiting since it is the first time since 1976 that an object of this size has passed this closely to the Earth," said Scott Fisher, a program director of the NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences, in an NSF webchat Thursday (Nov. 3) organized by ScienceNow. "It gives us a great (and rare!) chance to study a near-Earth object like this. In fact, we have several telescopes set up and ready to observe this event already."

Those telescopes include the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico and several NASA Deep Space Network instruments, to name a few.

Astronomers plan to use the telescopes to snap radar images of asteroid 2005 YU55 similar to one taken by the Arecibo observatory in April 2010, when the space rock flew within 1.5 million miles (2.4 million km) of Earth. Tuesday's flyby, however, is much closer and should allow astronomers to snap more detailed images of the asteroid. [Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space]

Observatories in Hawaii will also attempt to take spectroscopic measurements of the asteroid to analyze its composition, researchers said.


Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/11/04/giant-asteroid-hurtles-closer-to-earth-than-moon-next-week/#ixzz1clgPjGEU

THEY ALL SAY DO NOT PANIC, SO DONT:)