Celestia Forums

Interesting thread at Slashdot, providing a link to the original story from National Geographic.

Slashdot writes: " ... a giant, peanut shaped asteroid known as 4179 Toutatis will pass within 1 million miles of Earth on Weds, the 29th [of September, 2004]. When it does, it will be the closest any known object of this size (3 miles) has passed near Earth in this century. No worry about impact yet, it should pose no threat until at least 2562."

Has anyone seend it? I read that it would be visible(with small telescopes) a few days before and after that close approach, so I tryed to see it yesterday because today it would be very low in the sky and tomorrow and on the 28th it wont be visible at all. I found two stars that with Toutatis formed a triangle, but I could not see toutatis(may be I saw it just for a few secs, but maybe it was just my brain that made me believe it was there becaise I was wanting to see it...)

is it me, or can you actually see that Toutatis is non-spherical in that animation above? It seems to be tumbling as it moves...

Evil Dr Ganymede wrote:is it me, or can you actually see that Toutatis is non-spherical in that animation above? It seems to be tumbling as it moves...

It's not just you. It appears tumbling to me too. But that's probably an artifact of the animation. I don't think Toutatis is large enough to be resolved in a telescope (except maybe Hubble?). I think we know its shape only from radar observations.

I just read that the wobbling is real and that Toutatis has the wirdest motion in the solar system, Like a football moves after it's been trown. So maybe that's what you see there.

Latest news:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2004-240