For a third straight week, we have yet another opportunity to observe a near-Earth object, this one passing at just 4.1 LD on October 29th!
NEO 2005 VN is a 100m (300ft) asteroid discovered in 2005, a mere two days before passing within 17 LD of our planet. That discovery was made by LINEAR on November 2, 2005.
The last quarter of that year, 2005, was a busy time for discoveries in our near-Earth neighborhood, with several objects being discovered only after they had passed our planet. While a handful were small meteoroids, measuring anywhere from 5m to 30m, as many others were larger asteroids measuring many tens of meters to as much as 1km.
One of the smaller objects, 2005 WN3, actually passed less than a quarter the distance of the moon just seventeen hours after its discovery. The very next day, another small object, 2005 WY, passed at only 2LD six days after its discovery. Then, ten days later, yet another small object was discovered just two days before passing within a mere 0.6LD.
All totaled, the months of October, November, and December of that year saw fifty-five new discoveries, with a dozen of those objects passing less than 10LD from Earth, several of them before they were even discovered.
Our latest NEO, 2005 VN, will be featured with two Mission Alerts on Tuesday night, at 20:25 UTC and 22:00 UTC - that’s 4:25pm EDT and 6pm EDT. We’ll target it through the Slooh telescopes as it slips through the constellation Draco; and we’ll talk about its discovery, as well as several others in those last few months of 2005, on SloohRadio.
If you’re new to Slooh, or just new to our NEO events, this article, discussing last week’s near-Earth event, explains what you can expect to see through the Slooh telescopes. You’ll also find many NEO images and animations in the Slooh User Forums. And if you have any questions or would like to meet some of your fellow Slooh members, visit us in the Slooh chatroom. You’ll find chatroom access buttons in the left-side menu of the Slooh Launchpad and in the bottom left corner of your Mission Interface.
