On August 26, Jean-Claude Merlin got up early. Like every morning, he turned on his computer and looked at the images sent by the telescope at the Rio Hurtado station, in Chile. Thanks to the powerful processor with which he equipped his PC, he aligned the images to scroll them like a cartoon and detected the presence of an Apollo-type celestial body, unknown in this region of the sky.
It is between 300 and 500 meters wide, it is rather round and not potato-shaped like many
he describes. Analysis of its trajectory immediately revealed that it would cross that of the Earth during its annual rotation around the sun. The amateur astronomer immediately alerted the International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge (Massachusetts). The asteroid has been reported as a Near Earth Object (object close to the Earth, Editor’s note) – near-Earth in French – and that triggered a whole series of alerts and observations.
At the end of August, the asteroid was about 48 million kilometers from Earth. On September 16, it came within 39 million km and, on October 13, when it crossed the plane of the Earth's orbit, it had already somewhat regained its…
