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The SOFIA airborne observatory arrived Thursday, May 31st at NASA Dryden in southern California, flown from Waco, Texas where its 2.5m telescope had been installed. See more info below. Credit: NASA/Tony Landis.

Contents  on 2 June '07

• Minor-Object News -- seven items
• Minor-Object Science -- two papers
• IAU Minor Planet Center
  • NEOCP Activity -- two listings: 2 new
  • New MPECs -- two MPECs
  • Observers -- four observing facilities
• Impact Risk Monitoring -- nothing to report
• Chronology

WELCOME to A/CC's prototype daily news publication designed to be the viewing end of a planned autonomous 24-hour news service. The new tools and this publication format are working well enough now to share with readers. It is expected that this approach will require less time to maintain than our previous news and small asteroid pages, which were retired on May 14th. There's still more development ahead and there probably will be some glitches along the way, but this is what's needed to keep up with the increasing pace of minor-object news. The CRT page will be maintained separately for a little while longer, until all of this is working smoothly. And the CRT and small-asteroid ephemerides will be kept going.

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Minor-Object News  on 2 June '07

• "Broken crane delays Dawn launch," Florida Today 2 June - Quote: "The [launch pad] crane broke Wednesday and at least three days of work have been lost. It's not clear when NASA's Dawn mission will launch, but the delay will increase until the machine is fixed."
• 2007 DT103 radar campaign: JPL has posted a 2007 DT103 Planning page ahead of observations scheduled for July 24th and 28th and August 1st from Goldstone in southern California. Optical astrometry and photometry are both requested to help prepare for this work. It is noted that 2007 DT103, which is on the order of 400 meters in diameter, "will approach within 0.0238 AU (9.3 lunar distances) on July 29 when it will be a very strong radar imaging target... This object will brighten to about 14th magnitude in early August, when it will be a good target for photometric, spectroscopic, and thermal infrared observations."
• Amateur comet discovery: Comet C/2007 K5 first appeared in the public record when posted to the MPC's NEO discovery Confirmation Page (NEOCP), which MNAMO first noted at 1857 UTC on May 29th. Two days later it was removed from the NEOCP and published in MPEC 2007-K80 as C/2007 K5 (Lovejoy), named for discoverer Terry Lovejoy of Queensland, Australia, who has an unusual digital camera Comet Search Program. That MPEC published seven astrometric positions from two observatories in the southern hemisphere during 29-30 May (see news) but provided a first orbit calculation based on "8 observations 2007 May 26-30." This parabolic path had perihelion at 1.12113 AU on April 26th. Today's MPEC 2007-L05 (see below) changes perihelion to May 2nd at 1.15389 AU, so C/2007 K5's closest point to the Sun appears to be confirmed as somewhat further out than Earth's own distance from the Sun. This object is receding from the Earth as well as the Sun and is presently calculated to go out of view for ground-based optical telescopes around the middle of next month.
        See JPL's animated orbit diagram to get a visual of how C/2007 K5 passes through the plane of the Solar System at an inclination of 64.8°, diving down between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter in January, rounding the Sun last month, and rising through again in November on its way out.
• "SOFIA Airborne Observatory Arrives at NASA Dryden," NASA Dryden 1 June - Quote: "NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, has arrived at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. The heavily modified Boeing 747SP was ferried to Dryden May 31 from Waco, Texas... SOFIA will be capable of 'Great Observatory' class astronomical science, providing astronomers with access to the visible, infrared and sub-millimeter spectrum with optimized performance in the mid-infrared to sub-millimeter range." - Note: Dryden will be SOFIA's operational base. See a photo of SOFIA landing at Edwards above.
• "WonderWoman: Hope Ishii," Bay Area Business Woman 1 June - Quote: "As a scientist who investigates comet rocks that formed over 4.5 billion years ago, [Hope Ishii's] unique area of study would be interesting to any child. An additional goal of Ishii's is to get children more excited about science, especially girls, who may feel discouraged in a male-dominated field."
• "Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?" Science News 2 June - Quote: "Around 1 million of these elliptical, sand-rimmed depressions [collectively known as Carolina Bays], measuring between 50 meters and 11 kilometers across, scar the landscape from New Jersey to Florida... The long axes of the great majority of the Carolina Bays point toward locations near the Great Lakes and in Canada -- a hint that the extraterrestrial object disintegrated over those locales." - Note: This report includes a photo of a "carbon-rich sediment" stratum found in Arizona corresponding to 12,900 years ago.
• "Sir Bernard and his telescopic vision," London Times 2 June - Note: About Jodrell Bank in the early days of the space race and the first use of this large radio telescope as a radar instrument.

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Minor-Object Science  on 2 June '07

• "Relict olivine, chondrule recycling, and the evolution of nebular oxygen reservoirs" by Ruzicka, A. with H. Hiyagon, M. Hutson & C. Floss, abstract & PDF from Christine Floss March 2007 - Quote: "The data are consistent with a model in which nebular reservoirs became less enriched in 16O with time. An earlier episode of chondrule formation produced type I chondrules and isolated forsterites in carbonaceous chondrites, and forsteritic grains that were incorporated into ordinary chondrites as relict grains in chondrules and as isolated grains. Later episodes of chondrule formation produced both type I and type II chondrules in ordinary chondrites under a variety of thermal and redox conditions."
• "Hammadah al Hamra 193: the first amphibole-bearing winonaite" by Floss, C. with B.L. Jolliff, G.K. Benedix & 2 others, abstract & PDF from Christine Floss April 2007 - Quote: "The presence of fluoro-edenite in HaH 193, a meteorite that experienced extensive thermal metamorphism, indicates a significant stability field for this rare mineral."

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NEOCP Activity  on 2 June '07

The MPC's NEO Confirmation Page has 2 listings: 2 new

When last checked at 2359 UTC today, the Minor Planet Center's NEO discovery Confirmation Page (NEOCP) had two new listings. Both of these were "one nighters." This listing info is unchanged since when checked at 0106 UTC on today.

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New MPECs  on 2 June '07

Minor Planet Electronic Circulars

There were two MPECs issued this day from the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• MPEC 2007-L04 time-stamped "06:08 UT" - Daily Orbit Update - see below
• MPEC 2007-L05 time-stamped "13:36 UT" - Comet C/2007 K5 (Lovejoy)

MPEC 2007-L05 - "13:36 UT" - Comet C/2007 K5 (Lovejoy)

• CK07K050   C/2007 K5 (Lovejoy) (i=64.8°, q=1.154 AU, TP=2007 May 2.278 TT) from Kambah Obs. (June 2.34-35p3)

<< DOU on 2 June '07 >>  MPEC 2007-L04 - "06:08 UT" - Daily Orbit Update

• K07F42V   2007 FV42 (arc=73 days, H=17.8 ~933m) from Greiner Research Obs. (June 1.22-25p23) and Petit Jean Mtn. South Obs. (PJMSO) (June 1.32-36p6)
• K06K89E   2006 KE89 (i=45.1°, q=0.211 AU, arc=3 opp, H=16.5 ~1.70 km) from PJMSO (June 1.34-35p5)
• K05A13D   2005 AD13 (arc=2 opp, H=17.9 ~891m) from PJMSO (June 1.33p5)
• E5656   145656 4788 P-L from Mill Creek Obs. (June 1.21-22p4)

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Observers  on 2 June '07

Four observing facilities appeared in this day's MPECs.

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Impact Risk Monitoring  on 2 June '07

There was no risk monitoring news to report on this day.

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Chronology  on 2 June '07

Times are UTC for when the items were noted by Major News.