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

Today's issue status: done

• News briefs – Rosetta news
• Risk monitoring – no news

Cover: Gianluca Masi, Franco Mallia, and Roger Wilcox caught this track of 4179 Toutatis at 0000:09-0011:54 UT this morning using the remote-controlled educational Southern TIE (SoTIE) 14" telescope at Las Campanas, Chile. At the time Toutatis was coming in for its closest approach to Earth in many centuries — for the period 1353 to 2562, coming to four lunar distances at 1336 UT (9:36am EDT) today. You can see the animation of this sequence and a later set at the observers' 4179 Toutatis page.
      ESO has a news release and images today showing the parallax of the close passage as seen this morning from telescopes at La Silla and Paranal in Chile. A NASA headquarters news release informed the public yesterday that this “Large Asteroid Will Zoom Safely Past” (see JPL's illustrated version).

Rosetta news:  ESA's very complex Rosetta comet mission posted a status report yesterday telling about the week of 17-24 September with payload commissioning activities, testing for interference during simultaneous instrument operations, and slewing the spacecraft to “different solar aspect angles to measure stray light.” Apart from all the successful shakedown work were some interesting bits: One payload exhibited “unexpected behaviour” during commissioning, the ESA New Norcia deep-space communications station in Australia lost some telemetry due to misconfiguration, and “manual intervention” was needed to retrieve uncorrupted data from one instrument. There was daily communication with New Norcia, and a NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) 34m antenna at Goldstone in southern California was also used for a four-hour session.

Risk monitoring 29 Sept.

There is no news to report today in risk monitoring.