‘Potentially hazardous asteroid’ surprisingly large, but no threat, telescopic view reveals

The Washington Post

When the asteroid named 3200 Phaethon passed by our planet this month, people were watching. The asteroid is not a huge space rock, but it zips close enough to Earth that NASA classifies Phaethon as a “potentially hazardous asteroid.”

This does not mean that Phaethon posed any immediate danger. Potential space hazards are matters of cosmic perspective: On Dec. 16, the nearest Phaethon has been since the 1970s, it was 6 million miles from us. The moon, for comparison, is 240,000 miles away.

In Puerto Rico, the Arecibo Observatory watched Phaethon’s passage.

Radar revealed that the asteroid was 0.6 miles wider than thought, at 3.6 miles in diameter. If an asteroid of Phaethon’s size hit Earth, the impact would be so devastating it would destroy the ozone layer “several times over,” planetary scientist Dan Durda told NBC News recently, plunging the planet into a period of global chill.

Phaethon remains too far away to be a threat, but its influence may, on occasion, take a dramatic turn. The asteroid spews out dust in a trail behind it. When the granules of space rock collide with Earth, fireballs appear in the atmosphere. These are the Geminids, a meteor shower that peaked earlier this month.

Arecibo, the world’s second-largest radio telescope has not had an easy year. Hurricane Maria roughed up the observatory, destroying a 40-foot dish and damaging other instruments. All told, the hurricane cost between $4 million and $8 million in damage, James Ulvestad, National Science Foundation acting assistant director, told The Washington Post.

But the telescope escaped total devastation. All staff evacuated safely, an NSF representative told The Post in September, and the massive main dish remained intact. The Universities Space Research Association, which helps operate the observatory, distributed generators to some Arecibo employees. By December, the observatory had resumed normal operations.

The hurricane was not the only threat to Arecibo’s future. The observatory’s funding has been shrinking, and under some proposals, it would have been demolished or turned into an educational facility. The NSF, which owns the observatory, announced in midNovember that it was committed to keeping Arecibo operational.

The observatory, once back online, captured the best-resolution images of Phaethon ever taken, which NASA released late this month. The asteroid has a curious dark splotch near one of its poles. “The dark feature could be a crater or some other topographic depression that did not reflect the radar beam back to Earth,” Patrick Taylor, a scientist at Arecibo Observatory and the Universities Space Research Association, said in a news release. The new, detailed inspection of Phaethon showed that it is shaped like a ball, though it has a depression along its middle.

This is not the last we will see of Phaethon. It will return, dashing by Earth again in 2093.