The Sky Tonight

December 13, 2012

Student Team Provides Real-Time Video of Asteroid Toutatis
Brookline MA (SPX) Dec 13, 2012
An asteroid that some day might threaten Earth is passing relatively close by on the night of December 11-12, and its gliding path among the stars will be tracked by a team of high-school students at the Clay Center Observatory in Brookline, Massachusetts. The asteroid, known as 4179 Toutatis, is a lumpy, elongated object roughly 3 miles (5 km) long. It circles the Sun in a looping oval that ranges from just inside Earth's orbit to well beyond Mars. This orbit is unstable, and some day Toutatis mi ... read more

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