“But there are plenty of things out there that are smaller than that. “We are not in any imminent danger from anything as big as, say, what killed off the dinosaurs,” says Yan Fernandez, an astronomy professor at the University of Central Florida. It was back up and running just in time for Phaethon’s passage.Īrecibo’s radar operation is funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Programme, which is part of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office, founded in 2016 to monitor and plan for possible asteroid impacts. The island was without electricity, and a shortage of diesel in the immediate aftermath meant there wasn’t enough fuel to operate the observatory’s generators, forcing a temporary shutdown of the telescope’s radar. The Arecibo telescope suffered minor damage from Hurricane Maria, which had devastated Puerto Rico months earlier. This is important information that we almost didn’t get. The images of Phaethon captured at the Arecibo Observatory revealed that the space rock has what may be a large crater at its equator, and is bigger than astronomers first thought.

More important, it was also picked up by one of Earth’s most powerful telescopes, a bowl one thousand feet across, nestled in a sinkhole in the forests of Puerto Rico. Phaethon, named for the son of the god of the sun in Greek mythology, was last visible from Earth for a few days in mid-December last year, coming close enough to be seen even by amateurs’ telescopes. And there are more than eight hundred other PHAs - that we know of. If it ever hit the Earth, it could cause devastation beyond what we can imagine. Because of its size and proximity to us, Phaethon is categorised as a “potentially hazardous asteroid,” or PHA, by NASA. First sighted in 1983, it occasionally crosses paths with Earth. The Phaethon asteroid - a giant, globe-shaped rock more than three and a half miles across at its centre - orbits the sun just like the eight planets in our solar system.

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