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NASA has been waiting for weeks, not because of the holiday season, but because of the pbadage of a space body relatively close to Earth – and with the odd shape of a hippopotamus. The asteroid SD220 of 2003 is the one that has come close here in a cosmic way over the past 400 years. The next one to be, "in the neighborhood", will be only in 2070.
The US Space Agency has therefore taken the opportunity to take a cone, or rather to l & # 39; study and make this book beautiful. For this she used a combination of radars and what you can see below is "the asteroid-hippo" (and it is normal that only the first really looks like one of these creatures, is not it?) Of a length of 1.6 km.
Images were taken between December 15 and December 17 from microwave signals sent by the 90-meter antenna of the California Goldstone Space Communications Complex; and the Arecibo Observatory, from a height of 1,000 feet, in Puerto Rico. The 330-foot Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia has been used as a bi-static receiver. This "mix" has resulted in what NASA has described as "photographs of unprecedented level of detail", comparable to those taken on a spacecraft.
Source: NASA
The 2003 SD220 has a slow rotation period of about 12 days and non-main axis rotation. The resolution of the images was as good as those obtained at 12 feet – 20 times larger than those of the asteroid three years ago. With this, NASA can better understand how small celestial bodies are formed and evolve.
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