The whistling asteroids will have new close -ups

ROcketing by tens of thousands of kilometers per hour, asteroids visiting the land district will get a close -up this week. Using the radar, scientists will scan these space rocks when they go through our planet, creating newly detailed profiles of almost land objects for a more in -depth study.

The technology, deployed by the Solar Solar System network of DEEP NASA NASA, recently captured new attractive “1997 QK1” asteroid profiles, which sailed by Earth last month in its closest approach in more than three and a half centuries. The “peanut” rock is approximately 600 feet in diameter, and more than two dozen radar images have relayed new information on its shape and its spin.

The radar system can reveal details on space rocks to a resolution of some 25 feet – not too bad for targets that take place at such high speeds, often more than a million kilometers. The resulting images can tell us a lot about these almost land celestial objects, including more information on their size and rotation, as well as their density.

Many objects that radars scan are almost complete with the unknowns of science. For example, this week, asteroids that the Goldstone radar will urge will include an object known as “2025 QO1”, which has just been discovered in August. It could have about 250 feet in diameter, “but otherwise, nothing is known about its physical properties,” reports NASA.

Another object for radar imaging is “2025 QV9” more than 100 feet, discerned from data collected by the Pan-Starrs 1 telescope in Hawaii just a few weeks ago. This might not seem too heavy of an object, as regards the cosmos, but, as explained by the astrophysicist Paul Sutter Nautilus50,000 years ago, an asteroid 150 feet wide collided with what is now Arizona, releasing energy “equivalent to 600 Hiroshima bombs … [and] A wind of 1,000 mi / h operated more than two miles from the site. »»

Finally, there is “2009 FF”, which was documented for the first time in 2009 by the Massive Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona, a current project which has particularly succeeded in locating almost land objects. The visit to this week of the 2009 FF, which seems to have about 500 feet in diameter, will be the closest to the earth for the next 149 years.

But even the closest to these, 2025 QV9 will always be a reasonably comfortable distance from the earth, of around 1.2 million miles.

Later this month, the Goldstone Radar system will also have the opportunity to scan “2025 FA22”, spotted earlier this year from the Pan-Starrs project in Hawaii and which was previously reported as an object of potential impact. This designation has been demoted, but almost 500 feet wide, it is the largest asteroid to get closer (less than half a million Miles) of the earth since 2022, and it will probably maintain this designation until 2027. Like so many other almost land objects, “we know little about its physical properties”, as NASA notes. The next radar imaging will probably reveal more about this close visitor.

You can see a list of upcoming objects that the radar system will scan here. And if you want a more in -depth image of the hunt for rocks potentially in the interest of the land of space, we have a story for you on people who direct this wild effort.

Image of lead: Triff / Shutterstock

• Katherine Harmon Courage

  Published on September 9, 2025

  Katherine Harmon Courage is the editor -in -chief of Nautilus.