Asteroid 462959 (2011 DU)
Asteroid (462959) 2011 DU is designated as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) with a size comparable to a football field, ~160 – 360 meters in size. It is also an Apollo-class asteroid – those whose orbits cross the orbit of the Earth (there are currently about 21,083 known Apollo-class asteroids). Asteroid 2011 DU orbits the Sun every 463 days (1.27 years), coming as close as 0.02 AU and reaching as far as 1.54 AU from the Sun. The next close encounter is predicted to be on October 16 2035, at 0.1 AU.
We have observed asteroid (462959) 2011 DU during its closest approach to Earth on 25th April, 2025. However, it had safely passed at 0.033 AU (~12.8 lunar distances) from Earth. Its brightness at the time of observation was 16.6 apparent visual magnitude (using the standard IAU H-G magnitude model). The image is a composite mosaic from 3 exposures, 300 sec each in i-band.