Live Webcast: Keck Telescope To Watch Asteroid Flyby

Kamuela HI – One of the world’s largest optical/infrared telescopes will be attempting to catch near infared light images of asteroid YU55 on Nov. 8. The observing run will be webcast live on UStream from the Keck II Remote Operations room in Kamuela, Hawaii, starting no later than 7 pm local time (9 pm U.S. PST / 0500 UT). 

At the helm of the 10-meter Keck II telescope and using Keck’s pioneering adaptive optics to view YU55 will be asteroid investigators William Merline and Peter Tamblyn of Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo.; and Chris Neyman of Keck Observatory.

Asteroid YU55, will be making its closest approach to Earth - just 324,600 kilometers - today at 3:26 pm U.S. PST. Keck observers will be trying to see the asteroid as it flies directly overhead and away from Earth. Their hope is to get infrared images and perhaps a three-dimensional view of the asteroid.

The live webcast will play in the box below beginning at or before 9 pm U.S. PST, or can be found via the Keck Observatory Facebook page:

Live video by Ustream

For questions during the webcast, please email Larry O’Hanlon directly at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), watch via the Keck Observatory Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/W-M-Keck-Observatory/258556413246?sk=app_196506863720166) or tweet using the hashtag #KeckAsteroidWatch.

The telescope time to study asteroid YU55 was awarded as part of NASA’s share of the time on this telescope. The work is funded by NASA’s Planetary Astronomy Program and NSF’s Planetary Astronomy Program.

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The W. M. Keck Observatory operates two 10-meter optical/infrared telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. The twin telescopes feature a suite of advanced instruments including imagers, multi-object spectrographs, high-resolution spectrographs, integral-field spectroscopy and a world-leading laser guide star adaptive optics system which cancels out much of the interference caused by Earth’s turbulent atmosphere. The Observatory is a private 501(c) 3 non-profit organization and a scientific partnership of the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA.