YU55 Asteroid Gets Snapped By Keck Observatory

That blurry blob you see in the photo below that looks sort of like a not quite spherical orange is actually the first photo of the YU55 asteroid that I mentioned not too long ago. This asteroid will streak by the earth below the orbit of the moon making it very close indeed. NASA still maintains there is no danger to the earth... unless the asteroid starts to slow down and intelligent robots pop out.

The asteroid is 1,300 feet wide and it will come within 201,700 miles of the Earth. NASA has had plenty of advanced warning to get scientists, astronomers and telescopes ready to check out the asteroid as it makes its fly by. YU55 is still far away right now, but when it gets closer the resolution of the photos will increase greatly to 13-feet.

The pick you see here was shot by astronomers at the Keck Observatory. One reason the image you see is so blurry is that it is an infrared image of the asteroid. The raw data captured by the Keck observatory will take "days" to process according to the scientists working there. We should expect a lot more information to be coming over the next several days about the asteroid.

[via Discovery News]