Huge Asteroid’s Earth Flyby Caught on Video

A new video captures the giant asteroid 4179 Toutatis tumbling through space on its flyby of Earth.

The asteroid Toutatis video, which is about 40 seconds long, combines 64 radar images taken Wednesday and Thursday (Dec. 12 and 13) by NASA's Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif. On those days, Toutatis was about 4.3 million miles (7 million kilometers) from Earth, or about 18 times farther away than the moon is.

The new radar images — which have a resolution of 12 feet (3.75 meters) per pixel — show the 3-mile-wide (5 kilometers) asteroid in striking detail. Toutatis is revealed to be an elongated, irregularly shaped object with multiple ridges, researchers sa…
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