28 March 2005 - Monday

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MOS on the Web – Minor object science reporting elsewhere:

• "Solar history lessson," Grand Forks, North Dakota Herald 28 March article: "Although the opportunities to do this sort of work are numerous... Hardersen said he and Gaffey are among [only] about a dozen professionals who perform near-infrared spectroscopic measurements of asteroids. As a result, Hardersen stressed the need for more students to do graduate-level work in planetary astronomy."
• "Asteroid Impact Fueled Global Rain of BBs," Space.com 28 March article — See also a 23 March news release.

Risk monitoring:  Yesterday's Daily Orbit Update (DOU) MPEC reported that 2004 MN4 had been caught Saturday night by Pla D'Arguines Observatory in Spain, the first that this famously hazardous object had been reported in almost exactly 22 days (the March 5th observation also came from Pla D'Arguines). NEODyS yesterday very slightly changed its overall risk ratings for 2004 MN4.
      Today's DOU carries observation of 2005 EU2 last night from Pla D'Arguines as well as Begues Observatory in Spain. And NEODyS has now very slightly lowered its risk assessment for this small object while cutting its impact solution count in half, from 69 to 32.
      At last check, JPL hasn't updated its risk assessments for these two objects. [JPL's assessments were issued the next day, on March 29th.]

26 March 2005 - Saturday

MOS on the Web | risk monitoring | index | << ^^ >> | top

MOS on the Web – Minor object science reporting elsewhere:

• "NASA camera problem," Denver, Colorado Rocky Mountain News 26 March article: "Engineers are evaluating a focusing problem on the main camera of the Boulder-built Deep Impact spacecraft." — See also news yesterday.
• "Hale-Bopp: The Comet That Doesn't Quit," Sky & Telescope 25 March article: "Comet Hale-Bopp ... is still detectable (about 20th magnitude) [and still has a tail] despite being a whopping 21 astronomical units from the Sun." — Note: A search shows that astrometry has been published in MPECs for C/1995 O1 only three times, in MPEC 1995-P01 seven days after the discovery was announced, a day later in 1995-P02, which included a single Siding Spring precovery position from 27 April 1993, and in Observations of Comets MPEC 2004-A17. This may seem odd for a spectacular comet so well observed in its time, but routine publication of update MPECs for comets didn't begin until February 2002. While the January 6th observations told about in the Sky & Telescope article, plus observations from Australia last March and this February, were noted in IAU Circulars of February 7th and March 2nd, no related astrometry has appeared yet in an MPEC.
• "Dinosaur-killing asteroid rained hot rocks," UPI wire story at Washington, D.C. Times 25 March — See also the 23 March news release.
• An American Geophysical Union media advisory posted at EurekAlert 25 March gives links to its upcoming joint assembly with various partner organizations and a way to search among more than three thousand abstracts. General topics of special interest to A/CC readers are comets and impact craters. There is a lot about the Chicxulub Crater, including a report on the just-completed seismic imaging of the submerged portion of the crater from the R/V Maurice Ewing (see also related).
• "Proba workshop: small satellite yielding beautiful results," ESA 24 March news item: "Proba's largest instrument is the Compact High Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (CHRIS), a hyperspectral imager that can view the Earth's surface to a spatial resolution of 18 metres in a combination of up to 19 out of 62 programmable spectral bands... CHRIS images are also planned to be used as part of the Impact Crater Discovery Project, a collaboration between ESA, the University of Vienna and Logica CMG to utilise data mining techniques to automatically sift through the terabytes of Earth Observation data acquired each year to detect possible meteorite impact craters... The plan is to acquire CHRIS images of the BP impact crater in Libya, which has already been studied extensively from the ground. With a diameter of up to 2.8 kilometres the crater is large enough to fit within a single CHRIS [image], and will be used to assess ways of increasing the accuracy of the automatic sorting process." — See also the Proba and CHRIS pages, and the workshop with a presentation on "Automatic recognition of crater-like structures in terrestrial images" by J. Earl.

Risk monitoring:  Today's Daily Orbit Update MPEC reports observation of 2005 FE3 from Great Shefford Observatory in England last night, and today JPL removed its impact solutions for this object, which was posted just yesterday.