Asteroid 455176 (1999 VF22) will swing past Earth on Tuesday as a ground-based telescope observe its movement with precision to track its future movement in our solar system. At its closest, the Near-Earth Object will come as close as just 5.4 million kilometers to Earth.
The Virtual Telescope Project will do a live stream of the asteroid as it zooms past the planet starting at 7 pm EST (5:30 am Wednesday IST). The project began in 2006 and is under the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Italy and managed by Dr. Gianluca Masi, consisting of several robotic telescopes.
“The Virtual Telescope Project will show it live, online, just before the fly-by time. This way, you can join the journey from the comfort of your home,” founder Gianluca Masi said in a statement.
Asteroid 455176 (1999 VF22) has an estimated diameter in the range of 190-430 meters and will zoom past Earth two years after its last arrival. It last visited Earth in 2020 and the Jet propulsion Laboratory has been tracking its movement in our Solar System. The object will come close to Earth at a staggering speed of 90,360 kilometers per hour.
The asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Catalina Sky Survey, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Small-Body Database. The asteroid’s next close approach will be in November 2023. The object orbits the Sun once every 1.5 years and will be tracked using the Goldstone Radar Antenna in California.
Asteroids are rocky fragments left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. According to JPL, an asteroid is classified as a near-Earth object when its distance from our planet is less than 1.3 times the distance from Earth to the Sun (the Earth-Sun distance is about 93 million miles).
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