| Friday | 13 August 2004 | 5:32pm MDT | 2004-08-13 UTC 2332 |
News briefs
Bits & pieces: Chris Peterson has posted a Cloudbait Observatory 2004 Perseid Shower page with a wonderful composite of 133 meteors caught 11-12 August with his all-sky camera, plus another image and a time distribution graph. (See more Perseids coverage.) Following media reports this week of a NASA decision to proceed with a Hubble Space Telescope robotic servicing mission, Wired News told yesterday that it had checked and “NASA spokeswoman Dolores Beasly confirmed that no paperwork has been signed nor any funding allocated for such a mission.” It notes that the cost is estimated at up to $1.6 billion, and Congress recently moved to cut $1.1 billion from the next NASA budget. Re-entry event: SpaceWeather.com had an alert earlier today that “Sky watchers in Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada and |
The Asteroid/Comet Connection's Today's issue status: done
Arizona should be alert for a possible fireball between 2:50 and 3:05 p.m. PDT” from a re-entering Russian International Space Station supply rocket that was at that point predicted to disintegrate over the western U.S. today. The subsequent final prediction, however, had a path arcing across Canada with re-entry at 17:10 UTC (10:10am PDT) +/- 45 minutes. Before removing the whole news item, SpaceWeather.com said “A sky watcher in Nanaimo, British Columbia, reports seeing ‘a sudden flash and a smoke trail’ at 1:47 p.m. PDT.” |
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Risk monitoring
 13 August  The Friday Daily Orbit Update MPEC has observation of 2004 PU42 from LINEAR in New Mexico spanning more than two hours early yesterday, and from both sides of midnight overnight from Great Shefford Observatory in England. Today NEODyS posted this object, while JPL cut its count of impact solutions, cut its size estimate from 20 to 10 meters/yards, and very slightly raised its low risk assessment. |
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