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The GROWTH-India Telescope at the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle, Ladakh, captured a 116-meter (380-foot) asteroid, 2011 MW1, as it flew past Earth on July 25, 2024, just ten times the distance to the Moon, highlighting India’s growing role in tracking near-Earth objects with cutting-edge robotic observatories.
GROWTH-India telescope and the asteroid pass
The asteroid 2011 MW1, roughly the size of a small building at about 116 meters across, passed Earth on July 25 at a high speed of 28,946 km/h and a distance of around 2.4 million miles (10× lunar distance). The GROWTH-India telescope tracked its rapid motion so precisely that stars in the background appeared as streaks in the images.
Varun Bhalerao, an astrophysicist at IIT Bombay’s STAR lab, shared the image on X (formerly Twitter): “We tracked the rapid motion of the asteroid as it zipped across the sky at just 10× lunar distance. The rapid motion makes background stars look like streaks.”
The GROWTH-India Telescope, India’s first fully robotic optical research telescope, stands at roughly 0.7-meter aperture and is housed at 4,500 meters altitude in Hanle, Ladakh—making it one of the world’s highest observatories. It was developed by the Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA) and IIT Bombay, with funding and support from the Department of Science and Technology, Indo-US Science & Technology Forum, and IIT Bombay’s alumni.
This telescope is part of the international Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen (GROWTH) network, designed to monitor fleeting cosmic events without interruption by daylight. Its main mission includes observing near-Earth asteroids, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and other fast-changing phenomena.
The successful tracking of 2011 MW1 underscores the GROWTH-India Telescope’s ability to observe fast-moving space objects, which is vital for mapping their paths, assessing any threat, and enriching global efforts to understand near-Earth asteroids.
