A 10-meter asteroid approaches the Earth
September 8, 2010, a small asteroid with the designation 2010 RF12 will fly by the Earth. The diameter of the celestial body is estimated to be 7-14 meters. The object was discovered Sept. 5th by the American Mt. Lemmon Sky Survey. The minimum distance from our planet will be 84,000 km., which is a little over twice the distance of the orbit of geostationary satellites.
2010 RF12 belongs to the Aten family. The semi-major axis of the orbits of this family is less than 1 a.u. Practically all Atens have a large eccentricity; for some members of the family, it is larger than 0.9! In connection with this, several asteroids cross the orbit of Mercury and approach within 0.1 a.u. of the Sun. Today at our observatory we acquired position measurements of this cosmic newcomer. You can see its picture on the left.
Our plans for the autumn
Today is the first day of Fall. The influence of the monsoons is lessening, and the nights are getting longer. During this season we plan to increase the productivity of the observatory, improving the automation of routine processes. This full moon we installed a new observatory guiding complex – RTS2. At the moment it is going through checkout, after which we will begin testing under real conditions.
We are changing our strategy on “deep” surveys, with the goal of detecting super-slow and distant objects. This way we can detect objects to mag. 21.5, at a distance of tens of astronomical units. Additionally, the work continues on alert observations of the optical afterglow of gamma ray bursters, and also photometry of near-earth asteroids (NEAs). And when the moon lights up the dark skies above our observatory, we can rest a little and independently occupy ourselves with problems of Potentially Hazardous Objects.
MPC statistic for August 2010
The new monthly MPC circular released.
ISON-NM statistic for the previous month (July 20 – August 21):
Number of measurements: 7777
Measured objects: 1861
Discovered objects: 7 (2010 PK26*; 2010 PX58; 2010 PY58; 2010 PY74, 2010 PR75*; 2010 PS75; 2010 PT75)
Sky coverage: 880 sq. degrees
Observing nights**: 19
* – interested object
** – include partial nights
TOP 20 number of observations by 2010 year:
Year Code # Obs # Num MPs # Unnum MPs #Comets #Sats 2010 C51 3752281 98846 53961 94 6 2010 704 1000204 79801 5393 58 1 2010 G96 745875 78185 30958 40 0 2010 703 591011 62291 7456 44 0 2010 691 370928 44816 18049 29 3 2010 F51 251195 62189 9834 0 0 2010 J75 180726 32512 2126 8 0 2010 E12 130160 18732 1393 18 2 2010 D29 91013 18147 1378 3 1 2010 291 33521 5397 2700 23 1 2010 106 25615 5548 228 8 1 2010 G92 16285 3627 271 4 0 2010 H15 10764 2348 134 19 0 2010 683 9103 1455 23 4 0 2010 A77 8803 1555 311 79 0 2010 H21 6673 109 763 25 0 2010 A50 5497 1470 251 2 0 2010 926 5327 264 801 21 0 2010 J04 5216 1142 288 2 0 2010 H10 3878 396 176 67 0