The Asteroid/Comet Connection's Today's issue status: done
Cover: A magnitude -8.8 fireball graced the dawn sky over El Paso, Texas for 0.95-second at 5:44am MDT yesterday, as shown in this composite flight image from Jim Gamble's Sandia infrared fisheye all-sky camera image with north up and east left. The path is toward the northwest and coloring is added to the grayscale frames by the Sandia software to help reveal detail. The same camera also picked up magnitude -8.3 and -9.4 meteors at 3:22 and 3:31am that morning, and Sandia Labs' own camera, 355 km. (220 miles) to the north, caught another at 3:27am (see news yesterday). |
| News briefs – panel 1/1 | Major News for 20 July 2004 |
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News briefs
Meteor news: The NASA Johnson Space Center astromaterials curation lab Antarctic Meteorite Newsletter (AMN), which usually publishes in February and August with new descriptions, today published a special July edition (2.32Mb PDF, map) to describe and announce availability of just one meteorite, the 715.2-gram (1.6-lb.) MIL 03346. It is the seventh known Martian nakhlite (volcanic rock) and was found in the Miller Range of the Transantarctic Mountains during the 2003-04 search by ANSMET (Index), which brought back 1,358 meteorites. Case Western Reserve University has a news release today, as does NASA headquarters.
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Bits & pieces: Sky & Telescope has an article today by David Levy marking the 10th anniversary of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Jupiter impacts with some personal memories. See also A/CC's July 16th cover and links. Actel Corp. has a news release today about how more than 400 of its radiation-tolerant and radiation-hardened [field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been utilized in the ESA Rosetta comet mission. |
| Risk monitoring - panel 1/1 | Major News for 20 July 2004 |
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The Tuesday Daily Orbit Update MPEC (DOU) carries observation of 2004 OD4 from Powell Observatory in Kansas yesterday morning and KLENOT in the Czech Republic last night. Today both NEODyS and JPL removed this small Earth-buzzer from from their risk listings. The DOU has observations of 2004 NL8 from Ondrejov Observatory in the Czech Republic from Friday night and from Powell Observatory this morning, and today both risk monitors slightly raised their risk assessment for this mile-size object. And the DOU has two positions reported from the Australian National University 1m telescope from yesterday, which appears to be tied to JPL removing this object's last impact solution yesterday. |
Note: The CRT and SRT tables are used to show the active pursuit of objects with impact solutions, so 2004 MO7 will be dropped from these tables tomorrow. It hasn't been reported observed since June 20th, and hasn't been reported seen with telescopes smaller than 2.3 meters (see June 30th news). The European Spaceguard Central Node (SCN) has an observing campaign for this object, but it was dropped from the SCN Priority List after July 9th, when it was noted as going out of view for most observers after July 13th. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||