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

Today's issue status: done

• C/2004 K3 (LINEAR) orbital evolution
  by Pasquale Tricarico
• News briefs – meteor news, impact news
  + bits & pieces
• Risk monitoring

Cover: Rafael Ferrando produced this collage illustrating his observations of 2004 JR1 from late on July 3rd at Pla D'Arguines Observatory in Spain. North is down and east is left. 2004 JR1 is a kilometer-size near-Earth object that was discovered May 11th and announced the next day in MPEC 2004-J52. MPEC 2004-K44 correlated it with an object observed 10-11 June 1999.

C/2004 K3 (LINEAR)
orbital evolution

By Pasquale Tricarico

Now that C/2004 K3 (LINEAR) has been calculated to have a closed orbit, rather than making a one-way trip through the inner Solar System, A/CC asked Pasquale Tricarico to take look at its minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) with Mars.–Ed.

I have integrated the orbit using MPC orbital elements until the year 2450, the comet's next perihelion passage. The MOID with Mars is now about 16.9 lunar distances (LD), or 0.043 AU. In 2450 this changes to 14.2 LD (0.036 AU). And the MOID with Jupiter is now about 0.45 AU and evolves to 0.448 AU in 2450. But there aren't actual close approaches.

I have also checked until the year 6000 with another integration, and the orbital elements don't change too much, except for perihelion distance, which seems to be moving toward smaller values at each approach, as you can see in the screen shot from ORSA.

Since the orbit is not well defined and the period of the comet is very long, this analysis is very preliminary.

Meteor news:  Thanks to Herbert Raab for pointing out Karl Kaiser's report of a fireball over Germany seen from Schlaegl in northern Austria at 2025 UT on June 25th. His report includes photos of the trail, and asks for anyone else who witnessed this event to please contact him.

Impact news:  The Virginian-Pilot has an article today, “Cape Charles embraces its crater history,&148; It tells that some core drilling samples from the Chesapeake Bay impact structure (Index) are being flash-frozen to prevent DNA contamination, as researchers will be looking for evidence of post-impact biological recovery beginning with hydrothermal environments such as found at deep-sea volcanic vents. They think they have found the crater's central rebound peak, and also “two other points of high gravity, which could mean lesser peaks, which could mean the object that made the crater broke apart before impact and actually hit separately.”

Bits & pieces:  The Arizona Republic has an article today, “Flames within a quarter-mile of observatory.” See also CNN and the Tucson Citizen today, a Disaster News Network report, and the news thread from yesterday (“Bits & pieces”) about the situation on Mt. Graham. A wildfire southeast of Flagstaff has been threatening power transmission lines that supply Phoenix, where fire at a power substation could already result in rolling outages. Most of Arizona's considerable NEO observing activity is well away from Phoenix, but it isn't clear how outages in the state's largest metropolitan area might affect the statewide power grid.

New Scientist has an article today [URL fixed], “Life unlikely in asteroid-ridden star system.” See A/CC news Sunday (“Bits & pieces”) for more about that.

Risk monitoring 7 July

The Wednesday Daily Orbit Update MPEC has no observations of objects with impact solutions, but the Minor Planet Center Last Observation page has shown today that Goodricke-Pigott Observatory in Arizona and Reedy Creek Observatory in Queensland, Australia have picked up 2004 MP7 today.