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Stardust Rendezvous with Tempel 1
On February 14th–15th, 2011 NASA’s Stardust spacecraft flew by comet Tempel 1 (aka 9P/Tempel) photographing the comet’s surface from as close as 181 km (112 mi). This wasn’t Humanity’s first encounter...
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Crowdsourcing for Orbit Calculation
Images aligned in celestial coordinates. Top: Total pixel density of the images, with a log stretch. The right panel shows the same image as the left panel with a coordinate grid and the trajectory of...
View ArticleOrbit-Orbit Identification – The Case of 1984 QY1
As many NEOphiles may have noticed, the largest of the “lost” NEOs was identified recently by Andrea Boattini (of the CSS), with some help from Giovanni Valsecchi (link). The MPC contributed by adding...
View ArticleHow the MPC Defines “Interesting”: An Overview of Digest2
Sonia Keys, one of the MPC programmers, has written the first in a series of articles that will explain how the program Digest2 works. In short, Digest2 looks at a recently observed object moving...
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Jupiter vs. Comet P/2011 P1: No Contest
“In the red corner, weighing in at 1048 Earth masses, King of the Planets, give it up for Juuuupiteeeer! And in the blue corner, weighing in at one ten-billionth of an Earth mass, the new kid on the...
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First Ground-Based Discovery of a Kreutz Sungrazing Comet since 1970
These are Terry's 3 discovery images taken on the night of November 27, 2011; they have been stacked and aligned (which is why all stars are in trplicate). The blurry fellow in the center of the frame...
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