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Asteroid Toutatis
Asteroid 4179 Toutatis, which is about 1.5 miles wide and 3 miles long, has an orbit that crosses Earth's orbit and brings it close every four years. On September 29, 2004 at 13.37 UTC, Toutatis made the closest approach in this century of any known asteroid at least as large as Toutatis (or more precisely, of any known asteroid with an absolute magnitude as small as H = 15.30). It came within 962,951 miles of Earth (four times the distance of the Moon). The asteroid was discovered by C. Pollas on January 4, 1989, at Caussols, France, on photographic plates taken on the 0.9-m Schmidt telescope by Alain Maury and Derral Mulholland during astrometric observations of Jupiter's faint satellites. Toutatis is the long streak in this image.
The discoverers named the asteroid after a Celtic/Gallic god whose name is invoked often in the well known comic book series "Les Aventures d'Asterix," set in ancient Gaul. Toutatis is the protector of Asterix and his compatriots, who fear nothing except that someday the sky may fall on their heads.)
Toutatis's eccentric, four-year orbit, illustrated below by JPL's Near-Earth Object Program Office, extends from just inside the Earth's orbit to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The plane of Toutatis's orbit is closer to the plane of the Earth's orbit than any other known several-kilometer Earth-orbit-crossing asteroid, or ECA. It is in a 3:1 mean-motion resonance with Jupiter that serves as a dynamical pathway from main-belt orbits to Earth-crossing orbits on time scales of a million years. Toutatis may have the most chaotic orbit studied to date, a consequence of the asteroid's frequent close approaches to Earth.
Click here for a movie of Toutatis tumbling.