the new telescope Guille and Solà (TGS) del Pujalt Observatory (Anoia, Barcelona) has premiered doing a tracking and filming asteroid 1994 PC1, that has a size of 1 kilometer in diameter and that on Tuesday night, at 10:51 p.m., passed through the closest point to Earth, 1.9 million km, about 5 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
This asteroid was discovered in 1994 from Australia and belongs to the group of Apollo asteroids, which orbit the Sun in close orbits to the Earth.
From the Astronomical Park of the Pujalt Observatory, the astronomer Josep Maria Llenas has done this monitoring with the new telescope, pending official inauguration due to the epidemic, which has thus launched its research work by collaborating in providing data on this asteroid for the scientific community.
Llenas explained that “this asteroid is not no danger to earth At the moment, however, the follow-up of this and many others help the scientific community to be able to adjust much better close approximations in the future.”
NASA’s DART mission
The astronomer also recalled that last November the NASA launched the DART mission, whose objective is to impact an asteroid in order to slightly vary its orbit and thus be able to verify if, with current technology, an asteroid like the one that 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous, extinguished the dinosaurs could be diverted and that it calculates had a diameter of about 10 kilometers.
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The data collected at the Pujalt Observatory have been shared with the research team led by astrophysicist Josep Maria Trigo, of the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC).