2007 TU24
asteroid
2007 TU24 is an Apollo near-Earth asteroid that was discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona on 11 October 2007. Imaging radar has estimated that it is 250 meters (820 ft) in diameter. The asteroid passed 554,209 kilometer (344,370 mile or 1.4-lunar distance) from Earth on 29 January 2008 at 08:33 UTC. (At the time of the passage it was believed the closest for any known potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) of this size before 2027, but in 2010 2005 YU55 was measured to be 400 meters in diameter.) At closest approach 2007 TU24 had an apparent magnitude of 10.3 and was about 50 times fainter than the naked eye can see. It required about a 3-inch (76 mm) telescope to be seen.
Impact risk assessment
From the date of discovery of asteroid 2007 TU24 on 11 October 2007, a total of 316 observations of it had been made by 31 January 2008, spanning 112 days. Now the asteroid has an observation arc of about 9.6 years and the trajectory is well defined. It was removed from the Sentry Risk Table on 4 December 2007 at 14:05 UTC.
2008 passage
Goldstone Observatory carried out radar observations on January 23 and 24 January 2008. As of then, the orbit of the asteroid was known with such a high precision that scientists were able to calculate close approaches from the year 67 AD to 2141 AD. On 29 January 2008 at 08:33 UTC, 2007 TU24 passed by the earth at a nominal distance of 0.0037043 AU (554,160 km; 344,340 mi) with a relative speed of 9.248 km/s.
Observations from Arecibo Observatory were taken on 1–4 February. It is a contact binary asteroid.
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This entry incorporates text from “2007 TU24” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.