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Sorting out broken comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann, Peter Birtwhistle has correlated ground-based astrometry with a mosaic of Spitzer Space Telescope imagery from 4-6 May 2006, rotated to horizontal perihelion order with earlier to the left. This small detail comes from the right of the second brightest piece, fragment B (not shown). See more info below. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/W. Reach. Annotation ©Copyright Great Shefford Observatory, used with permission.

Contents  on 22 August '07

• Minor-Object News -- nine items
• Minor-Object Science -- two papers
• IAU Minor Planet Center
  • NEOCP Activity -- seven listings: 6 new, 1 updated
  • New MPECs -- two MPECs
  • Observers -- nine observing facilities
• Impact Risk Monitoring -- one object reported
• Chronology

Resources:

• Consolidated Risk Tables - CRT page
• Ephemerides for risk-rated objects
• Ephemerides for small asteroids

The latest news: framed access (best), RSS news feed (flags updates), or redirection - Note: A/CC has a main Web site and a backup site.

Navigation tips: Use the << and >> arrows on the menus for each regular section (Observers, Risks, etc.) to move to the previous and next day's news for that section. Use the Index menu item to access specific days this year through a calendar interface. And use the all-up news archive to access news from any time since A/CC began in early 2002. To keep track of what's new each day, watch the Chronology section.

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Minor-Object News  on 22 August '07

• Comet piece work: Peter Birtwhistle at Great Shefford Observatory in England has updated his 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann gallery pages for this comet's near-Earth perihelion passage and continuing breakup in May of last year. More pages have been added to show his detailed analysis of ground-based observations correlated with infrared imagery from the Spitzer Space Telescope (full mosaic, see a detail above). This appears to be the first such identification effort published on this scale and includes an exhaustive cross-listing of 64 fragments, five of which Great Shefford discovered [not ten, as first reported--Ed.], and their circumstances. {permalink}
• "Plasma Rocket Engine: New Agreement Inked," LiveScience.com 22 Aug. - Quote: "The first agreement for the commercial use of the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) has been signed [between] Houston, Texas-based Ad Astra Rocket Company ... and Excalibur Exploration Ltd. [granting] right of first refusal to acquire VASIMR engines for space resource recovery [and providing for a] study to support the development of a conceptual asteroid mission." {permalink}
• Bits & pieces: The NASA Dawn mission home page has been updated in the last day to state: "Launch Date: Sept. 26 (No earlier than); Launch Time: 7:24 a.m. EDT."
        In case you missed it, you might like to go back and take a look at an update MPEC issued last Saturday for unusual near-Earth asteroidal object 2007 PU11. Its discovery by LINEAR on August 13th was announced eight days ago, when observations from the Catalina Sky Survey from June 26th were also reported, and it has appeared in every DOU MPEC from the 15th through yesterday. In the update MPEC, "precovery" observations were published that had been found by Reinder Bouma in the archives from Siding Spring Digitized Sky Survey from 8 January 1989, and from JPL's NEAT program in 2002 from Mt. Palomar on June 30th and Haleakala November 28th. This object is estimated from its brightness to be on the order of 1.78 km. in diameter, but could be much larger if it is a dark, inactive comet nucleus.
        Not exactly minor-object science but still interesting is this about the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. A paper posted at arXiv.org yesterday, "Do flares in Sagittarius A* reflect the last stage of tidal capture?" by A. Cadez et al., explores "the idea that such flares are produced when the central black hole tidally captures and disrupts a small body -- e.g. a comet or an asteroid." {permalink}
• "Hubble Teams with Google to Bring the Cosmos Down to Earth," HubbleSite 22 Aug. - Quote: "As you zoom in [with Sky in Google Earth], the constellations disappear and your chosen object emerges from the background. The image is set within a background of real stars and galaxies taken by two powerful visible-light surveys of the heavens, the Digitized Sky Survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The Digitized Sky Survey comprises photographic surveys of nearly the entire sky and contains about a million objects. The Sloan survey comprises images of hundreds of millions of much fainter objects and covers more than a quarter of the sky." {permalink}
  • "Heavens above, now Google reaches for the stars," Sydney Morning Herald 23 Aug. - Quote: "Sky in Google Earth allows viewers to zap across the cosmos at warp speed, zooming in on 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies, as well as the paths of the planets... Anyone spotting something unusual in the sky could quickly determine whether they had discovered a new comet, or had just stumbled across something well known." {permalink}
  • "Google Earth Gets Cosmic Addition," Space.com 22 Aug. - Quote: "Google's product enters a market with several competitors. Starry Night [published by SPACE.com's parent, plus] The Sky (Software Bisque), Celestia (Open Source), SkyTools (Skyhound Software). Microsoft is also creating the Virtual Observatory, expected to be very similar to Google Sky." {permalink}
• "HAWK-I Takes Off," ESO 22 Aug. - Quote: "Europe's flagship ground-based astronomical facility, the ESO VLT, has been equipped with a new 'eye' to study the Universe... [HAWK-I] is uniquely suited to the discovery and study of faint objects, such as distant galaxies or small stars and planets [and] will also be a perfect instrument for the study of outer Solar System bodies, such as distant, icy asteroids and comets... HAWK-I takes images in the 0.9 to 2.5 micron domain over a large field-of-view of 7.5 x 7.5 arcminutes [with] four 2k x 2k array detectors, i.e. a total of 16 million 0.1 arcsecond pixels." {permalink}
• "Testing Radon Anomalies on The Carswell Project," ESO Uranium Corp. at PR Newswire Europe 22 Aug. - Quote: "The Carswell Structure [in Saskatchewan] is considered by many geologists to be an astrobleme impact site. The comet or meteorite that crashed into this part of the Athabasca sedimentary basin is believed to have punched right through the sedimentary rocks" {permalink}
• "Strange Asteroids Baffle Scientists," Space.com 21 Aug. - Quote: "Two space rocks in our solar system's outer asteroid belt might contain mineral evidence for a new class of asteroids or long eroded mini-worlds. The asteroids, (7472) Kumakiri and (10537) 1991 RY16, were found to contain basalt ... evidence that an object was once large enough to sustain internal heating." {permalink}

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Minor-Object Science  on 22 August '07

• "Apollo asteroids (1566) Icarus and 2007 MK6: Icarus family members?" by Ohtsuka, K. with H. Arakida, T. Ito & 6 others, abstract & PDF at arXiv.org 22 Aug. - Quote: "Although it is more complicated to search for near-Earth object (NEO) families than main belt asteroid (MBA) families, since differential orbital evolution within a NEO family can cause current orbital elements to drastically differ from each other, we have found that Apollo asteroids (1566) Icarus and the newly discovered 2007 MK6 are almost certainly related. Specifically, their orbital evolutions show a similar profile, time shifted by only ~1000 yr, based on our time-lag theory. The dynamical relationship between Icarus and 2007 MK6 along with a possible dust band, the Taurid-Perseid meteor swarm, implies the first detection of an asteroidal NEO family, namely the 'Icarus asteroid family'." {permalink}
• "Brown dwarf formation by gravitational fragmentation of massive, extended protostellar discs" by Stamatellos, Dimitris with David Hubber & Anthony Whitworth, abstract & PDF at arXiv.org 22 Aug. - Quote: "We suggest that low-mass hydrogen-burning stars like the Sun should sometimes form with massive extended discs; and we show, by means of radiation hydrodynamic simulations, that the outer parts of such discs (R>100 AU) are likely to fragment on a dynamical timescale ... forming low-mass companions: principally brown dwarfs (BDs), but also very low-mass hydrogen-burning stars and planetary-mass objects. A few of the BDs formed in this way remain attached to the primary star, orbiting at large radii. The majority are released into the field [some as BD/BD binaries]... This BD formation mechanism appears to avoid some of the problems associated with the 'embryo ejection' scenario, and to answer some of the questions not yet answered by the 'turbulent fragmentation' scenario." {permalink}

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NEOCP Activity  on 22 August '07

The MPC's NEO Confirmation Page has 7 listings: 6 new, 1 updated

When last checked at 2354 UTC today, the Minor Planet Center's NEO discovery Confirmation Page (NEOCP) had six new and one updated listings. Of these, six were "one nighters." So far Major News has counted a total of eight objects listed on the NEOCP at some point today.

To learn how observers use the NEOCP, see the Practical guide on how to observe NEOCP object by Birtwhistle et al. at Suno Observatory.

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New MPECs  on 22 August '07

Minor Planet Electronic Circulars

As of last check at 2354 UTC, there have been two MPECs issued today from the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

• MPEC 2007-Q15 time-stamped "06:09 UT" - Daily Orbit Update - see below
• MPEC 2007-Q16 time-stamped "14:23 UT" - 2007 QK2

MPEC 2007-Q16 - "14:23 UT" - 2007 QK2

• K07Q02K   2007 QK2 (H=20.5 ~269m) was discovered at 1155 UT 21 Aug. by the Siding Spring Survey (SSS), which observed it at Aug. 21.50-52p4 and 21.58-62p7. The discovery was confirmed by Farpoint Obs. (Aug. 22.11-12p3), Hibiscus Obs. (Aug. 22.25-27p3), Rolando Ligustri via RAS Obs. Mayhill (Aug. 22.31-33p2), and Mt. John Obs. (Aug. 22.38-39p3).

<< DOU on 22 Aug. '07 >>  MPEC 2007-Q15 - "06:09 UT" - Daily Orbit Update

• Observations of risk-listed objects
• K07P27V   2007 PV27 (arc=7 days, H=20.4 ~282m) from Shenton Park Obs. (Aug. 21.66p3)
• Observations of other objects
• K07P28F   2007 PF28 (arc=6 days, H=19.0 ~537m) from Atlante Obs. (Aug. 20.96-98p3) and Robert Hutsebaut via RAS Obs. Mayhill (Aug. 21.27-28p3)
• K07D83B   2007 DB83 (arc=3 opp, H=18.3 ~741m) from New Millennium Obs. (April 10.01-06p4)
• K07C26K   2007 CK26 (arc=2 opp, H=19.0 ~537m) from SSS (Aug. 21.47-49p8)
• K05G00G   2005 GG (arc=3 opp, H=16.0 ~2.14 km, q=0.694 AU) from SSS (Aug. 21.59-61p5)
• F4555   154555 2003 HA from New Millennium Obs. (April 10.04-08p4)
• F4453   154453 2003 CJ11 from New Millennium Obs. (April 10.01-06p4)
• F4007   154007 2002 BY from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.93-98p4)
• F2895   152895 2000 CQ101 from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.93-98p4)
• E5656   145656 4788 P-L from New Millennium Obs. (April 10.03-07p4)
• 86039   86039 1999 NC43 from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.85-86p2 & 10.84-86p4)
• 40267   40267 1999 GJ4 from New Millennium Obs. (April 10.03-08p3)
• 16636   16636 1993 QP from Bornheim Obs. (Aug. 11.92-94p5)
• 05626   5626 1991 FE from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.85-87p2 & 10.85-87p2)
• 04544   4544 Xanthus (1989 FB) from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.91-97p4 & 10.92-94p2)
• 04257   4257 Ubasti (1987 QA) from New Millennium Obs. (April 10.02-07p4)
• 04055   4055 Magellan (1985 DO2) from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.92-97p4 & 10.92-94p2)
• 03554   3554 Amun (1986 EB) from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.82-83p2 & 10.82-84p2)
• 03103   3103 Eger (1982 BB) from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.86-96p6 & 10.86-94p6)
• 01866   1866 Sisyphus (1972 XA) from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.84-85p2 & 10.84-85p2)
• 01627   1627 Ivar (1929 SH) from New Millennium Obs. (April 9.83-85p2)

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Observers  on 22 August '07

Nine observing facilities appear in today's MPECs.

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Impact Risk Monitoring  on 22 August '07

Legend: VI# = VI count, Prob Cum = cumulative probability, PS Cum/Max = cumulative/maximum Palermo Scale, TS = Torino Scale

An impact solution, also known as a "virtual impactor" (VI), is not a prediction but rather a possibility derived from an orbit calculation that cannot be eliminated yet based on the existing data. Elimination can come quickly with just a little further observation or may take weeks or months, sometimes years. Once superceded or eliminated, a former impact solution has zero relevance to an object's risk. See Jon Giorgini's "Understanding Risk Pages" for more about this.

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Chronology  on 22 August '07

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