Asteroid 'QE2' to Cruise By Later This Month Without Incident

As far as Earth-oriented cosmic occurrences go, it'll be much more "Love Boat" than "Titanic."

Described by scientists with the National Aeronatics and Space Administration as nine-times longer than an ocean cruise ship, asteroid 1998 QE2 --- actually not named after the famous Cunard liner with the same nickname --- will reportedly sail past Earth no closer than about 3.6 million miles, about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

The fly-by, says NASA officials, won't be very eventful for those anticipating an asteroid-based armageddon, but it will be a great opportunity for those who own or at least operate giant radar telescopes.

"Asteroid 1998 QE2 will be an outstanding radar imaging target at Goldstone and Arecibo and we expect to obtain a series of high-resolution images that could reveal a wealth of surface features," said radar astronomer Lance Benner, the principal investigator for the Goldstone radar observations from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"Whenever an asteroid approaches this closely, it provides an important scientific opportunity to study it in detail to understand its size, shape, rotation, surface features, and what they can tell us about its origin," he said. " We will also use new radar measurements of the asteroid's distance and velocity to improve our calculation of its orbit and compute its motion farther into the future than we could otherwise."

The closest approach QE2 will make to Earth in at least another 200 years is predicted on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC).

Asteroid 1998 QE2, discovered in 1998 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program near Socorro, New Mexico, is believed to be about 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) long.

Its name was assigned by the NASA-supported Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., which gives each newly-discovered asteroid a provisional designation that starts with the year of first detection, followed by an alphanumeric code indicating the half-month it was discovered, and the sequence within that half-month.

"It is tremendously exciting to see detailed images of this asteroid for the first time," said Benner. "With radar we can transform an object from a point of light into a small world with its own unique set of characteristics. In a real sense, radar imaging of near-Earth asteroids is a fundamental form of exploring a whole class of solar system objects."

Always exposed to the sun, asteroids can be shaped like almost anything under it. Some previously imaged by radar and spacecraft have approximated dog bones, bowling pins, diamonds, muffins and potatoes.

The shape of QE2 will come into focus May 30, when astronomers, using NASA's 230-foot-wide (70 meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, begin an extensive series of observations.