The Asteroid/Comet Connection's
daily news journal about
asteroids, comets, and meteors

Today's issue status: done

• Distant big object
• Small objects – report for 8-14 March
• News briefs – HST controversy & risk monitoring

Cover: Peter Birtwhistle's imagery of last March's Earth-buzzing small object, 2003 DW10, from Great Shefford Observatory in England, comes from exposures made soon after John Roger's 2003 DW10 image on last Sunday's "cover." They are an interesting comparison of the two observational techniques — stacking multiple frames on an object's motion (here), and tracking on an object in motion.

The Australian at around 1430 UTC today posted an article dated tomorrow telling that "NASA is expected to announce today" that "scientists have found a new world orbiting the solar system — more than 3 billion kilometres further away from the Sun than Pluto." The Times of India followed about half an hour later with a shorter article, and an Internet mailing list this morning has a message telling about finding a related and publicly available Hubble Space Telescope (HST) proposal. In fact, that proposal was mentioned in an HST Daily Report posted Friday by SpaceRef.com:
Loads for SA075O02_F1 [include] the additional "Director's Discretionary Target" [for] "Characterization of a Planetary-sized Body in the Inner Oort Cloud."

The newspaper articles say this object has been named "Sedna" and is thought to be slightly smaller than Pluto. That would put it between Pluto and three Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects roughly half Pluto's diameter. See David Jewitt's 1000 km Scale KBOs.

The official NASA announcement will be made at 1800 UTC (1pm EST) tomorrow [see report].

Note:  When A/CC first posted these news links at 1742 UTC, this object was described as being a member of the "inner Oort Cloud," which would be a first-ever discovery. However, it is not yet clear that this is a proper description. The "inner" (non-spherical) Oort Cloud region has been defined as being made up of objects with orbits that average between 2,000 and 15,000 times the distance beween Earth and Sun. See Tumbling Stone for an Oort Cloud diagram.

Postscripts:  Three other Australian news sites picked up The Australian story around 2130 UTC on March 14th, and BBC has posted a report with a 0112 UTC time stamp on the 15th [changed]. Also see the Tenagra Observatories home page with this today:

“ The MPEC (list of observations announcing the discovery) shows that the Tenagra II 32" (0.81-m) telescope at station 926 (Tenagra in S. Arizona) is the second set of measurements of the object that will forever change our idea of the solar system. ”

And more on the 15th UTC: Alan Boyle on MSNBC at 0100, SpaceDaily before 0230, and CNN at 0507.

Follow-up during 8-14 March
During this week only four near-Earth asteroid discoveries were announced, and none of them were of the smallest variety of around or less than 135 meters/yards wide. 2004 BW18 and 2004 CE39 continued to be tracked, however, and observations were also reported for 2004 BV18 from January and 2003 UL from last October. And all the rest of the action was in archive work, as detailed in the table below.

The archive work was by the Hungarian team of Krisztian Sarneczky and Brigitta Sipocz at the Szeged University (SZTE) Asteroid program. He is a geography teacher and physics doctoral student, and she is a first-year physics student. They do guest NEO observing together and when clouded out they have been generating a flood of additional positions found in the NEAT SkyMorph archive for objects of all sizes. This past week that included five small objects listed below.

<< previous report | skip table | small object table >>

Notes: Diameters in the following observation summary table are rough best estimates from a standard but very inexact H-to-size formula using H (absolute magnitude) from the JPL NEO Orbital Elements page, source also for Earth MOID (minimum orbital intersection). Other planetary MOIDs are from Lowell Observatory. Current Minor Planet Center H is also given, along with the original H from each object's discovery MPEC. Priorities and visibilities are from the European Spaceguard Central Node (SCN).

Hubble controversy:  First noticed at NASA Watch is that the Hubble servicing issue will be reported in the U.S. on CBS television "60 Minutes." Update: See a transcript.

Risk monitoring:  If you don't follow A/CC Major News regularly, you may be looking at today's news and wondering, Where is the impact risk monitoring report? There are no objects with impact solutions under current observation. The most recent had its last impact solutions removed on March 6th.

Planetary defense:  First noticed at SpaceToday.net is this from the BBC Friday, "Government 'ignores' space threat."