The Beast unmasked: Nasa captures incredible images of 1,200 foot wide asteroid that came within a million miles of Earth – and could have wiped out an entire city

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The Beast unmasked: Nasa captures incredible images of 1,200 foot wide asteroid that came within a million miles of Earth – and could have wiped out an entire city

Impact would have been similar to a nuclear warhead detonating
Experts say it would wipe out an entire city
Beast is travelling at 31,000 miles per hour or 50,400 kilometers per hour
By MARK PRIGG

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

t 1,200 feet wide, it could have caused an explosion measured in megatons and would have wiped out a city if it were to hit Earth.
Just days ago, a huge asteroid nicknamed ‘the Beast’ passed less than a million miles from us.
Today, Nasa revealed it captured these stunning images as it passed by – thankfully at a safe distance.
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Behold the beast: Nasa scientists used Earth-based radar to produce these images of the asteroid designated ‘2014 HQ124’ but known as the Beast as it passed by Earth on June 8, 2014.
HOW THEY DID IT
To obtain the new views, researchers paired the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, with two other radio telescopes, one at a time.
Using this technique, the Goldstone antenna beams a radar signal at an asteroid and the other antenna receives the reflections.
The technique dramatically improves the amount of detail that can be seen in radar images.

To image 2014 HQ124, the researchers first paired the large Goldstone antenna with the 1,000-foot (305-meter) Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
They later paired the large Goldstone dish with a smaller companion, a 112-foot (34-meter) antenna, located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) away.
A recent equipment upgrade at Arecibo enabled the two facilities to work in tandem to obtain images with this fine level of detail for the first time.
Captured on June 8, 2014, the new views of the object designated ‘2014 HQ124’ are some of the most detailed radar images of a near-Earth asteroid ever obtained.
The radar observations were led by scientists Marina Brozovic and Lance Benner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
The JPL researchers worked closely with Michael Nolan, Patrick Taylor, Ellen Howell and Alessondra Springmann at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to plan and execute the observations……MORE HERE

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