This AMOR CLASS asteroid is a small near Earth body that SST captured while shooting planet Mars. It is the namesake of the Amor group, a family of rocky bodies whose orbits come close to ours without ever crossing it.
Only about a kilometer wide, it tumbles through space as a rough, irregular block, its surface scarred by impacts and covered in a layer of broken stone. Seen at high resolution, its angular outline makes it look less like a world and more like a boulder left over from the birth of the solar system.
Because its path is slowly reshaped by the gravity of the planets, Amor is closely followed by astronomers, and every favorable approach is an opportunity to study one of the hardest and most primitive objects in our neighborhood.
MEADE 14” LX200, SBIG ST2K. Exposure time: 1.5 seconds in high resolution.
Image development in CCDops, Maxim DL4 and Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended