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News briefs
Namings & a numbering: On September 29th the Minor Planet Center updated its Discovery Circumstances pages with 81 new namings, from 3825 Nurnberg (1967 UR) to 90377 Sedna (2003 VB12), which is now the highest numbered asteroid with a name. Among other new namings are 4730 Xingmingzhou (1980 XZ), a Purple Mountain Observatory discovery named for the recently deceased SOHO comet hunter (news thread, “Bits & pieces”), 13926 Berners-Lee (1986 XT), named for the founder of the World Wide Web, and 74625 Tieproject (1999 RR34), named for NASA's Telescopes In Education (TIE). And there is also 12524 Conscience (1998 HG103), 37452 Spirit (4282 P-L), and 39382 Opportunity (2696 P-L).
Rob Matson tells A/CC about his namings in this batch, both of them for asteroids that he found in images archived from NEAT's Mt. Palomar telescope. 78578 Donpettit (2002 RM233) “is named after International Space Station Expedition 6 astronaut Don Pettit, with whom I did some work predicting on-orbit Iridium flares.” You can see examples of that work from March and May 2003. The other is 84225 Verish (2002 RO236), named for meteor observer and meteorite hunter Bob Verish (news Index), who has
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found more than a hundred meteorites in California, Nevada, and Arizona, including the “Los Angeles” Mars meteorite. (A change in MPC policy now keeps archive sleuths from getting credit and naming privileges for any further discoveries made of objects overlooked by JPL's NEAT program.)
P/2004 NL21 (LINEAR), an asteroidal object recently found to be cometary and then found in the NEAT archives (see “Comet precovery”), has been numbered 160P.
Meteor news: The Kewanee, Illinois Star Courier has a dubious September 29th report, “Meteorite just misses Kewanee man,” that A/CC checked yesterday with meteor-wrongs chronicler Ken Newton (home and news pages). He had already received a photo and informed the paper that this was not a meteorite. Marco Langbroek concurs, commenting that “This looks quite like a furnace slag to me.”
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