
Asteroid 2005 YU55 (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
By Jason McClellan
An aircraft-carrier-sized asteroid known as Asteroid 2005 YU55 recently passed between the moon and Earth, making its closest pass to our planet in 200 years. According to NASA, strange structures were detected on the large asteroid as it passed Earth at an impressive 30,000mph.
According to the BBC, two radio telescopes–the Goldstone Observatory in California and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico–recorded radio echoes off the asteroid “to understand better what it is made of and how it is shaped.” Scientists at the Goldstone Observatory assembled a short video of the asteroid using images generated from data acquired with the 230-foot-wide Deep Space Network antenna on November 7, 2011, between 11:24 a.m. and 1:35 p.m. PST. The images used to create this video are reportedly the highest resolution images ever made by radar of a near-Earth object. VIDEO
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