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News briefs
FMOP discoveries: A Spacewatch object temporarily designated SW40E6 was posted to the MPC NEO Confirmation Page (NEOCP) at June 19.57 UT. It is an FMO Project discovery by Ed Majden of British Columbia acting as a volunteer online reviewer of images from the Spacewatch 0.9m telescope. He is known for meteor trail spectroscopy and for having the only all-sky camera to catch the Washington fireball early this month (see news).
The FMOP object SW40E3 discovered by online volunteer Lawrence Garrett Thursday morning (see news) is a small object (H=23.3) announced today in MPEC 2004-M25 as 2004 MO1. It was confirmed the next morning with the same 0.9m telescope, and this morning by Grasslands and Table Mountain observatories.
Farpoint news: The Lawrence, Kansas Journal-World has an article from yesterday about the Northeast Kansas Amateur Astronomers League receiving a NASA grant to use the mirror and optics from the old
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Clyde Tombaugh Observatory 27" William Pitt Telescope at Kansas University to build the new Clyde Tombaugh Telescope to be installed at Farpoint Observatory for observation of near-Earth objects. The article, which has a sidebar about Tombaugh, tells that the original telescope coincidentally was funded in 1929 for asteroid observation, although it was not used for that purpose, and that its thick main mirror was the first to be made from Pyrex. The Associated Press has a version of this article that appears at news outlets such as the Wichita, Kansas Eagle yesterday. See also A/CC’s May 20th report.
Stardust news: Expatica has an article from yesterday telling that German researchers working with the Stardust Cometary and Interstellar Dust Analyser (CIDA) mass spectrometer report they have “found evidence of a co-enzyme similar to pyrroloquinoline-quinone (PQQ)” in the tail of comet 81P/Wild 2. A cometary source would explain “where the genetic makeup of PQQ co-enzymes, so necessary for life, came from if the Earth had no life able to produce such a genetic makeup.”
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