GROWTH, India's fully robotic telescope captures building-sized asteroid

A building-sized asteroid on its approach to Earth was captured by the Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH)-India telescope situated at the Indian Astronomical Observatory site at Hanley in Ladakh.

Varun Bhalerao, an astrophysicist at the Space Technology and Astrophysics Research (STAR) lab at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, shared the image of the asteroid on X.

"Last night, the GROWTH-India Telescope caught this 116-meter, building-sized asteroid on its closest approach to Earth! We tracked the rapid motion of the asteroid as it zipped across the sky at just 10x lunar distance. The rapid motion makes background stars look like streaks," Bhalerao captioned the post.

The GROWTH-India telescope is India's first completely robotic optical research telescope. It is a partnership between the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bengaluru and IIT Bombay. The primary scientific focus of this telescope is time-domain astronomy, which studies explosive transients and variable sources in the universe.

The GROWTH-India telescope's field of view is 0.7 × 0.7 degrees, with a pixel scale of 0.7 arcseconds per pixel. The GROWTH program is a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), a US government body that supports all fields of fundamental science and engineering except medical science.