Golevka
Key facts
- What it is
- Near-Earth asteroid (Apollo group)
- Size
- About 530 m across
- Discovered
- 1991, by Eleanor Helin
- Spacecraft
- Not yet visited
- Orbit group
- Apollo
- Average distance from the Sun
- 2.47 au (about 370 million km)
- Time to go round the Sun
- 3.9 years
- Closest and farthest from the Sun
- 0.94 to 4.01 au
- Tilt of its orbit
- 2.3°
- Closest its orbit comes to Earth's
- 3,400,000 km (8.8 times the Moon's distance)
- Spins once every
- 6 hours
An au (astronomical unit) is Earth's average distance from the Sun, about 150 million km. Orbit figures are from open tracking data, figures last updated 1 Nov 2026.
Golevka is a small near-Earth asteroid, about 530 metres across, that made history in 2003. That year it became the first asteroid whose orbit was shown to have been pushed by sunlight.
The push comes from the Yarkovsky effect. An asteroid absorbs sunlight during its day and gives the heat back out as infrared radiation. Because it is spinning, the warmest part of the surface is not the part facing the Sun but the afternoon side, a little later in its rotation, just as the warmest time of day on Earth comes after noon. The heat radiated from that side gives a tiny, steady thrust. Over years, it shifts the asteroid's orbit.
Golevka was observed by radar in 1991, 1995, 1999 and 2003. Radar measures distances extremely precisely, and by 2003 the asteroid was about 15 kilometres away from where it would have been with gravity alone. That matched predictions of the Yarkovsky effect.
This matters a great deal. The Yarkovsky effect is one of the main ways that fragments in the main belt are slowly moved into orbits that bring them towards Earth, which is how most meteorites begin their journey to us. It also has to be included in predictions of where near-Earth asteroids will be decades or centuries from now.
Eleanor Helin discovered Golevka at Palomar in 1991. Its name was made from the first letters of three radar observatories that studied it: Goldstone in California, Evpatoria in Crimea and Kashima in Japan.
Coming close to Earth
Its next passes within about 30 million km of Earth, worked out from its orbit. Each one is a safe miss.
| Date | Distance | In Moon distances |
|---|---|---|
| 14 May 2046 | 7,600,000 km | 20 |
| 19 Jul 2069 | 15,000,000 km | 39 |
| 19 Jun 2092 | 17,000,000 km | 43 |
| 19 Aug 2115 | 8,400,000 km | 22 |
| 22 Aug 2154 | 27,000,000 km | 71 |
| 4 Aug 2158 | 8,900,000 km | 23 |