4179 Toutatis
Ok, so Toutatis is a big rock in space that orbits around the sun. It's kind of like a big space boulder. Scientists who study things in space call it an asteroid. It's named after a cool god in ancient Chinese mythology.
Toutatis is really, really big. It's about 3 miles long! That's about as long as 44 football fields put together. It's so big that it's one of the largest asteroids that we know about.
Toutatis flies around in space in a bit of a weird way. It doesn't just go around the sun in a nice, neat circle like a planet does. Instead, it kind of wobbles and bobs up and down. That makes it tricky for scientists to predict exactly where Toutatis will go in the future, but they still study it because it's super interesting.
Recently, we even sent a special spacecraft to go look at Toutatis up close! It took some cool pictures and taught us even more about this big space rock. So even though it's just a big boulder floating in space, Toutatis is still pretty important to scientists who study things far, far away.
Toutatis is really, really big. It's about 3 miles long! That's about as long as 44 football fields put together. It's so big that it's one of the largest asteroids that we know about.
Toutatis flies around in space in a bit of a weird way. It doesn't just go around the sun in a nice, neat circle like a planet does. Instead, it kind of wobbles and bobs up and down. That makes it tricky for scientists to predict exactly where Toutatis will go in the future, but they still study it because it's super interesting.
Recently, we even sent a special spacecraft to go look at Toutatis up close! It took some cool pictures and taught us even more about this big space rock. So even though it's just a big boulder floating in space, Toutatis is still pretty important to scientists who study things far, far away.