| Wednesday | 6 October 2004 | 8:58pm MDT | 2004-10-07 UTC 0258 |
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News briefs
Lunar passages: Pasquale Tricarico via his ORSA@work page has posted lists of close encounters between asteroids and the Earth-Moon system during 1950-2100 with a distance threshhold of ten lunar distances (LD). The list with closest Moon approach distances shows last month's passage by 2004 ST26 at 0.076 LD (news thread) as the closest for the 150-year period. While lists of close Earth approaches by asteroids and comets are maintained by the Minor Planet Center and can be generated at JPL, to A/CC's knowledge this is the first and only listing anywhere for close Moon approaches by asteroids. Rosetta news: The Rosetta mission posted a status report yesterday for the week of 24 September to October 1st, telling about “observations with the spacecraft slewing to extreme attitudes (for stray-light measurement) or scanning the sky in complex patterns,” carried out mostly while off-line from ground communication. Pointing tests revealed some problems, including with the Alice instrument, which was found |
The Asteroid/Comet Connection's Today's issue status: done
to have an incorrect boresight offset, and further testing was planned for this week. Meteor news: Marco Langbroek has posted a movie made with ORSA showing the Netherlands Glanerbrug meteor impact of 7 April 1990. Comet news: Comet P/2004 T1 (LINEAR-NEAT) was announced today with MPEC 2004-T18. The first LINEAR observations are reported from September 21st, and the first NEAT observations came from its Haleakala telescope yesterday. The preliminary calculation has perihelion on November 5th at 1.7178 AU, out past Mars. |
