Radar images of near Earth asteroid as it zipped past the Earth
Click for original. Go here for movie made from these images.
Using the Goldstone radar antenna in California, astronomers have produced a series of 41 radar images of the near Earth asteroid 2025 OW as it made a close pass of the Earth on July 28, 2025.
Those images, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, are to the right.
The asteroid safely passed at about 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers), or 1.6 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
The asteroid was discovered on July 4, 2025, by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS2 survey telescope on Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. These Goldstone observations suggest that 2025 OW is about 200 feet (60 meters) wide and has an irregular shape. The observations also indicate that it is rapidly spinning, completing one rotation every 1½ to 3 minutes, making it one of the fastest-spinning near-Earth asteroids that the powerful radar system has observed. The observations resolve surface features down to 12 feet (3.75 meters) wide.
The asteroid’s fast rotation suggests it is a solid object, structurally strong, rather than a rubble pile held together loosely by gravity. It would thus be very damaging if it should ever hit the Earth.
No worries however. The refined orbital data says this asteroid will not come this close again in the foreseeable future.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Click for original. Go here for movie made from these images.
Using the Goldstone radar antenna in California, astronomers have produced a series of 41 radar images of the near Earth asteroid 2025 OW as it made a close pass of the Earth on July 28, 2025.
Those images, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, are to the right.
The asteroid safely passed at about 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers), or 1.6 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
The asteroid was discovered on July 4, 2025, by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS2 survey telescope on Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. These Goldstone observations suggest that 2025 OW is about 200 feet (60 meters) wide and has an irregular shape. The observations also indicate that it is rapidly spinning, completing one rotation every 1½ to 3 minutes, making it one of the fastest-spinning near-Earth asteroids that the powerful radar system has observed. The observations resolve surface features down to 12 feet (3.75 meters) wide.
The asteroid’s fast rotation suggests it is a solid object, structurally strong, rather than a rubble pile held together loosely by gravity. It would thus be very damaging if it should ever hit the Earth.
No worries however. The refined orbital data says this asteroid will not come this close again in the foreseeable future.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Looks a lot like 8-bit Space Invader icons. Just need some old Atari sound effects.
Well, if you assume it’s mostly iron, a rough calculation arrives at 20,000,000 pounds, with a reclaim value of $1,000,000. Not enough to mount a mining mission (yet).
Of course, once in-situ resource recovery/processing is a thing, it might be worth more on the Moon than Earth.
I would love to see that thing captured as a second moon
Chuck,
If Starship reduces launch costs to $200 per pound, the value in Low Earth orbit rises to $4 billion, and more valuable at the Lagrange points and in lunar orbit. This depends, of course, on the cost of pulling iron out of the lunar soil, because if that is not too expensive then that would be the place to mine various materials.
200 feet across and of solid rock with iron, sounds like a city killer. Meteor Crater in Arizona was made by
an iron rich asteroid believed to be 100 to 170 feet across.
Speed matters. 2025 OW was moving at just under 47,000 mph (13 miles per second) and presumably still is.
The Meteor Crater impact was estimated to be at 29,000 mph.
Twelve day warning for a potential city killing rock.
Nothing to see here.
Go back to your Kardashians and Sweeneys. Argue over where a relic space vehicle should sit as a museum piece. Armchair Quarterback some war on the other side of the globe.
The odds are in our favor with these rocks. Even if they hit, the world is mostly ocean. But the one day we roll the dice and get snake eyes, people will scream why, why did we not do something. Hear is to hoping it is not in our lifetimes.
Agreed.
Football season is coming–and that’ all that people care about.
The ocean is not great either: Tsunamis.