Earth is about to get another cosmic visit courtesy of a large asteroid that will zip past the Earth Monday night, with astronomers saying a good set of binoculars will let you see it.
The asteroid 2004 BL86 will be the closest space rock this size to fly by Earth until 2027.
At its nearest approach the space rock, discovered in 2004, will be 745,000 miles away, just three times farther away from us than the Moon, astronomers say.
That's not quite close enough for it to be visible to the naked eye -- sunlight reflecting from its surface will make it seem about the same brightness as a 9th magnitude star -- but a small telescope or a good pair of binocular should enable any determined sky watcher to spot it, they say.
In the Unites States the asteroid will be at its brightest from about 8 p.m. Monday through around 1 a.m. Tuesday morning, moving north across the constellation of Cancer.
"Asteroids are something special," says Don Yeomans, retiring manager of the Near Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
The not only provided Earth with the basic building blocks of life and much of our planet's water, he says, but in the future they could become valuable sources of resources such as mineral ores.
They might also serve as fueling stops for manned space missions exploring our solar system, he adds.
All in all, there's a lot about asteroids to make them exciting, he explains.
"There is something about asteroids that makes me want to look up," he says.
Sky watchers on the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast may have problems with overcast skies, forecaster say.
If you get socked in, you can always watch the asteroid's progress live on Slooh.com.
NASA astronomers will be tracking the 1,800-foot wide asteroid with radio telescopes in California and Puerto Rico.
"For objects that get this close, that are this large, the radar observations are really analogous to a spacecraft flyby in terms of the caliber of the data that we can get," said JPL's Lance Benner, principal investigator for the California observations.
The radar observations will yield resolution down to about 13 feet, so images captured of 2004 BL86 will be able to reveal features on the asteroid as small as a typical passenger vehicle, allowing a good determination of how rough or smooth its surface is, Brenner said.
