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

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – meteor news + bits & pieces
• Risk monitoring
  – JPL has posted 2004 RV164 & 2004 RW164
  – JPL & NEODyS have removed 2004 RF84

Cover: Robert Hutsebaut in Belgium closed out the confirmation process this morning for 2004 RV164, a small object that has now been posted with impact solutions (see below). This composite consists of five 20-second frames stacked for object motion of 11.60"/min. toward 80.0° (to the left of this image, eastward), caught with a Rent-A-Scope 0.25m telescope in New Mexico. Stars appear as streaks or five points of light, depending on their brightness.

Meteor news:  The Cadillac, Michigan News has an article from yesterday about meteorite hunter/dealer David Freeman. He roams Wyoming dry lake beds and found the state's 13th meteorite, the first new find in 56 years, he reports.

A deceased grandmother's humorous gift was reported with a straight face by El Tiempo of Venezuela today as a meteorite. Thanks to Ken Newton for this example of a meteor-wrong.

In his State College, Pennsylvania Centre Daily Times column today, meteorologist Joe Murgo answers a query about a sighting on the evening of 31 August, “Could it have been a meteor burning up or something of the kind?” He responds it was high-altitude venting of fuel during a satellite launch, as Space.com reported September 1st.

Bits & pieces:  Gianluca Masi and Franco Mallia have posted a page of images of comets C/2004 Q2 (Machholz ) and C/2004 R2 (ASAS) from the remote-controlled SoTIE educational telescope at Las Campanas in Chile, including an image of each from this morning.

Most objects picked up by Spacewatch's FMO Project turn out to be small (absolute magnitude H>22.0), but an

object reported from the morning of the 12th by Richard Broad of Australia was found to be both already known and somewhat larger — 2004 RS109 (H=18.8), as reported in the Daily Orbit Update MPEC yesterday. 2004 RS109 was discovered late on the 10th (see news, “Amateur NEO discovery”).

The Minor Planet Ephemeris Service (MPES) is showing that the Spacewatch 1.8m telescope in Arizona observed the distant unusual object 2004 PY42 on 12 and 13 September. (For more about PY42, see news thread, “Bits & pieces.”)

The U.K. Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council today updated its RoboNet page about the “global network of the world's biggest robotic telescopes, dubbed ‘RoboNet-1.0.’” Two, and soon three, 2m telescopes will act “as one instrument able to search anywhere in the sky at any time and (by passing the observations of a target object from one telescope to the next in the network) being able to do so continuously for as long as is scientifically important.”

Risk monitoring 14 Sept.

JPL has posted small object 2004 RV164 with impact solutions all beyond the NEODyS 2080 time horizon. It was announced today in MPEC 2004-R80 as discovered early yesterday by LINEAR in New Mexico and confirmed this morning (in observation time order) by Great Shefford Observatory in England, Farpoint Observatory in Kansas, Three Buttes and Grasslands observatories in Arizona, Table Mountain Observatory in southern California, and by Robert Hutsebaut running a remote-controlled telescope at New Mexico Skies (see “cover” image above).

JPL puts 2004 RV164's diameter estimate at roughly 50 meters/yards, but 2004 RW164 comes in at more than 770 meters. It was posted by JPL today after being announced in MPEC 2004-R81. Andrew Tubbiolo made the discovery yesterday morning with the Spacewatch 0.9m telescope in Arizona, and it was confirmed last night by KLENOT in the Czech Republic and this morning by Three Buttes, Grasslands, and Farpoint observatories, and by Mt. John Observatory in New Zealand.

The Tuesday Daily Orbit Update MPEC (DOU) has observation of 2004 RF84 from yesterday morning from LINEAR and both the Spacewatch 0.9m and 1.8m

telescopes, and last night from KLENOT. Today NEODyS and JPL both removed their last impact solutions for this kilometer-size object.

The DOU also reports 2004 RU109 from Sunday morning from Bill Yeung's 7300 Observatory in New Mexico and 19 positions Sunday night spanning 16 minutes reported from Starkenburg Observatory in Germany. Today both risk monitors lowered their risk ratings for this small object, which was briefly inside the Earth-Moon system yesterday (see image and more info).