Travelers In The Night

Asteroid 2014 JO25 is truly an amazing object. It orbits the Sun, every 2.94 years, on a very elongated path that goes closer to the Sun than Mercury and then it travels out to well past Mars. It must be made of hard rocky material since during its close approach to the Sun it was traveling at 84 miles/second. At that point, it was closer to the Sun than the planet Mercury and probably had a surface temperature greater than 800 F. Fortunately this asteroid never gets closer than about 4.4 lunar distances from Earth.