About a month before my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rik Hill spotted it, a 5 football field diameter asteroid had been almost as near to the Sun as the planet Venus. His discovery images showed it about to cross the Earth's orbit at a speed of 21 miles per second coming towards us. Additional observations by telescopes in Illinois, New Mexico, and Arizona showed that its 7.6 year path around the Sun will take it out to well past the planet Jupiter. This object's orbit is highly elliptical and inclined so that it moves above and below the plane where the planets and nearly all of the other solar system objects exist. It had crossed the Earth's orbital path moving towards the Sun about 6 weeks before it was discovered but nobody noticed it since it was faint and far away from Earth.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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