Toutatis Asteroid
Officially numbered 4179, asteroid Toutatis was discovered by French astronomer C. Polias in 1989. It is named after a god of the Celts and Gauls. Toutatis was a god of war and growth. His name means “King of the world”, “King of battle”, or “Father of the tribe”.
Toutatis is an odd asteroid, similarly shaped to that of a potato and is about 4.6 km (2.9 miles) long and 2.4 km (1.5 miles) wide. Toutatis’s 4-year orbit distance from the Sun ranges from just inside Earth’s path to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The plane of Toutatis’s orbit is closer to the plane of the Earth’s orbit than any known earth-orbit-crossing asteroid. The asteroid visits us every four years.
Toutatis passed near Earth on September 29, 2004. This picture was taken nine days before that time when it was still about 8 million miles away. It is a composite of ten exposures each about 30 minutes apart and shows its movement through space. How close was it when it passed Earth? Not close enough to worry about! Asteriod Toutatis passed within 961 thousand mils of Earth, about four times the distance to the Moon.
That is close by cosmic standards for an object that could cause global devastation. Toutatis hasn’t been so near since the year 1353 and NASA scientists have calculated that it won’t be that close again until 2562. No other asteroid so large is known to have come so close in the past, though accurate tracking of space rocks is a fairly recent, high-tech skill that still leaves wide margins of error for many objects.
Constellation: Capricorn
Location: RA: 21h 32m 23.3s, Dec: -22d 52m 23s, Epoch 2000
Size:
Magnitude:
Type: Asteroid
Exposure: 10 Sec, with approx. 30 minute intervals
Date: September 20, 2004
Instrument: Meade 12” LX200 w/AO-7 at f/10 (1 pixel=0.61 arc sec)