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

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – readings, namings & meteor news
• Risk monitoring – NEODyS & JPL have posted 2004 KE17 & planned MPC outage

Cover: The newest near-Earth asteroid discovery, 2004 KK17, announced today in MPEC 2004-K78 with confirmation from, among others, Robert Hutsebaut, who sent this stack of 24 20-second exposures made this morning with Rent-a-scope's new 0.25m f/3.8 Epsilon remote-controlled telescope at New Mexico Skies. He notes that the object's motion was measured at “3.33" toward 229.1°”

Readings:  BBC has an article today about "the first time . . . physical evidence for cooling at the K-T boundary" has been found associated with the Chicxulub impact. Nature Science Update has an article today, "Dusty nursery bears baby comets," about Spitzer planetary disk observations (A/CC links).

Namings:  Yomiuri Shimbun has an article today tells how Main Belt asteroid 7892 Musamurahigashi (1994 WQ12) in the May 6th namings was given a shortened form of the name of the now closed Musashimurayama-Higashi High School where co-discoverer Masanori Hirasawa once taught. It is one letter short of the 16-character maximum length for asteroid names.

The New Milford, Connecticut Spectrum has an article from May 28th about the naming of 25800 Glukhovsky (2000 CG83) for Lisa Glukhovsky, one of LINEAR's April 16th namings for science contest students and teachers (report).

Meteor news: 
Jim Gamble reports his all-sky fisheye camera in El Paso, Texas caught a magnitude -6.9 fireball traveling east-to-west overhead at 2:44am MDT yesterday, seen in his composite flight image.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune tells today that “Robert McDade, the owner of a mineral and fossil shop on Magazine Street, recently purchased the pieces of a 40-pound meteorite that crashed through the roof of an Uptown home last fall.” It reports he puts a value of “about $10 to $20 per gram” on the stony pieces, described as not looking like a meteorite. See A/CC's earlier reports.

Risk monitoring 31 May

The Monday Daily Orbit Update MPEC (DOU) reports observation of 14 near-Earth asteroids, including five with year-2004 designations, of which one is 2004 KE17. Today both NEODyS and JPL posted this object with a single low-rated impact solution in 2080, making it the first object to be under active risk monitoring since May 23rd. It was announced yesterday in MPEC 2004-K72 as discovered early Friday by LINEAR in New Mexico and confirmed that night by Consell Observatory in Spain, and the next morning by Three Buttes Observatory in Arizona, LINEAR, Farpoint Observatory in Kansas, and Tenagra II Observatory in Arizona. Bedoin Observatory in France closed out the confirmation process Saturday night. Today's DOU data came from LINEAR early yesterday. JPL reports that 2004 KE17 will be at its closest tomorrow around 1751 UT at 24 lunar distances.

MPC outage:  The MPC Status Page reports that the MPC Internet connection will be out for about an hour beginning at 6:45am tomorrow, 1045 UTC.

Note: The above Summary Risk Table and A/CC's Consolidated Risk Tables (CRT) page are used to follow the cycle of observation and analysis for objects under current observation that have impact solutions, so 2004 HZ, which hasn't been reported since May 7th (see news May 14th and 18th), will be pulled from these listings tomorrow.