2011 AG5: Oblong Asteroid As Big As Empire State Building Passes Earth

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States managed to capture the image of a huge asteroid as it hurtled past Earth at the beginning of February 2023. The asteroid, 2011 AG5, which was safely passed by Earth at a distance of around 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), was unharmed.

According to the space agency, this close approach provided the first opportunity to take a detailed look at the asteroid since it was discovered in 2011, revealing an object about 1,600 feet (500 meters) long and about 500 feet (150 meters) wide-dimensions comparable to the Empire State Building. The powerful 230-foot (70-meter) Goldstone Solar System Radar antenna dish at the Deep Space Network’s facility near Barstow, California, revealed the dimensions of this extremely elongated asteroid.

“Of the 1,040 near-Earth objects observed by planetary radar to date, this is one of the most elongated we’ve seen,” said Lance Benner, a principal scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory who helped lead the observations.

According to the space agency, asteroid 2011 AG5 orbits the Sun once every 621 days and won’t have a very close encounter with Earth until 2040, when it will safely pass our planet at a distance of about 670,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers, or nearly three times the Earth-Moon distance).

“Interestingly, shortly after its discovery, 2011 AG5 became a poster-child asteroid when our analysis showed it had a small chance of a future impact,” said Paul Chodas, the director for CNEOS at JPL.

“Continued observations of this object ruled out any chance of impact, and these new ranging measurements by the planetary radar team will further refine exactly where it will be far into the future.”