| Near Earth asteroid 2006 VV2 will approach the Earth to within 0.024 AU in late March-early April 2007 at which
time we request a short VLBA+GBT session to image and do astrometry of this asteroid while it's illuminated
by the Arecibo radar. Synthesis radar imaging can provide plane-of-sky image and position information orders of
magnitude better than other ground-based methods, and which is complementary to standard radar mapping. The
asteroid's diameter is likely between 1.5 and 2 km, and we expect a spatial resolution of order 50 m. We request the
raw data streams in order to correlate in software to achieve a narrow frequency resolution matched to the object's
bandwidth which depends on its unknown rotation rate but is likely #20 Hz. However, the echo from this object
may be strong enough to be seen at the relatively coarse frequency resolution of the VLBA correlator. |
