Close Asteroid Flyby Offers Unique Observation Opportunity

Asteroid 2015 TB145 will approach Earth within 0.0032 au (1.3 Lunar distances) on 31 October 2015. Very high resolution radar imagery is possible.
2015 TB145 was discovered on 2015 Oct 10 by the Pan-STARRS I survey. The object will approach the Earth within 0.0032 au (1.3 Lunar distances) on 2015 Oct 31. The asteroid is on an extremely eccentric (~0.86) and a high inclination (~40 deg) orbit. It has a Tisserand parameter of 2.937 indicating that it may be cometary in nature. Its absolute magnitude of 19.9 indicates that its diameter if within a factor of 2 of 320 meters.

At closest approach the SNRs/run at DSS-14 are expected to be over 20000, so this should be one of the best radar targets of the year. We hope to obtain images with a range resolution as high as 2 m/pixel using DSS-13 to transmit and Green Bank (and possibly Arecibo) to receive.

The encounter velocity is 35 km/s, which is unusually high.

This is the closest approach by a known object this large until 1999 AN10 approaches within 1 lunar distance in August 2027. The last approach closer than this by an object with H < 20 was by 2004 XP14 in July 2006 at 1.1 lunar distances. More information at NASA JPL