'Puzzling structures on surface' of YU55 spaceball NASA releases
radar vid of speeding cosmic voyager NASA boffins have released
a short video clip of the huge dead-black spaceball YU55,
roughly the size of a nuclear aircraft carrier, which barrelled
past Earth inside the Moon's orbit last night. They say it shows
"puzzling structures" on the surface of the mysterious cosmic
spheroid. As YU55 is blacker than charcoal to human eyes,
astronomers have mainly been looking at it using radar. The vid
above was generated by the 70-metre Deep Space antenna at
Goldstone, California, with each frame needing a 20-minute look
by the big radar as the spaceball zoomed tumbling into the
Earth-Moon system. "The movie shows the small subset of images
obtained at Goldstone on November 7 that have finished
processing. By animating a sequence of radar images, we can see
more surface detail than is visible otherwise," says radar
boffin Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The
animation reveals a number of puzzling s