Geographos

Geographos, an Apollo asteroid (one that passes inside Earth’s orbit). Geographos was discovered on September 14, 1951, by American astronomers Albert Wilson and Rudolf Minkowski at the Palomar Observatory. Geographos revolves around the Sun once in 1.39 Earth years in an eccentric moderately inclined (13.3°) orbit at a mean distance of 1.25 astronomical units (AU; about 187 million km [116 million miles]). Geographos rotates once in 5.2 hours. Compositionally, the asteroid’s surface resembles the stony iron meteorites. In 1994 radar observations found that Geographos has dimensions of 5.11 × 1.85 km (3.18 × 1.15 miles). That same year the U.S. spacecraft Clementine was scheduled to fly by Geographos after leaving lunar orbit, but a computer malfunction canceled that portion of the mission.