Last updated 2009 June 30

Welcome to the web site of the Asteroids and Remote Planets Section

of the

British Astronomical Association

The Site Guide may help you to find your way around the site. The What to observe page lists many different aspects of observing and imaging together with current projects.

The long-term objective is that the Section should be able to offer something to active, virtual and armchair observers eg; visual telescopic observing, imaging (photographic, CCD, webcam), virtual observing using on-line resources, orbital motion, the impact hazard, history of discovery and observation, general understanding of the planets and minor planets and space missions to those bodies.

Health and Safety

A much maligned topic but one that really should be taken seriously. One ARPS member recently had quite a nasty accident when he fell over when walking from his observatory back to his house in the dark. If you are planning to be out observing in the middle of the night please take a few minutes to consider the consequences of what might happen if you were to be incapacitated in any way.

Website update summary

Updated pages

Asteroid and Dwarf Planet News – MPC statistics updated

Books – ‘Meteors and How to Observe Them’ by Robert Lunsford added

Index – latest news added

Links – new websites and links to the ALPO Magnitude Alert Program added

Meetings

News archive – previous news on this page moved to News Archive

Observations received – reference to May, June observations added

Site guide – references to new pages added

Software – reference to Solex added

Table of contents – new pages included

Updated – references to new pages added

What to observe – sections on lightcurves using new method of determining V magnitude and phase curves/absolute magnitude added

New pages

May, June observations

Paper ‘A method of determining V magnitudes of asteroids from CCD images’ added

‘A method of determining V magnitudes of asteroids from CCD images - Hints and Tips for using Astrometrica and Guide’ added

News

Paper ‘A method of determining V magnitudes of asteroids from CCD images’ by Richard Miles and Roger Dymock published in the June 2009 issue of the BAA Journal can be found here. RECOMMENDED READING FOR ALL INTERESTED IN PHOTOMETRY.

Occult Version 4.0.6.7 can be downloaded from http://www.lunar-occultations.com/occult4/occult406%20update.zip Most users of Occult will not need to download this update. However note the 'Other changes' below. Anyone predicting Asteroid Occultations ***should*** download the update. The main change in this version concerns the probability estimates for occultations involving slow-moving asteroids. For all occultation predictions, there is an along-track uncertainty that is indicated as an uncertainty in the time of the event. That uncertainty necessarily involves a corresponding uncertainty in the rotational orientation of the Earth. Up until now, that uncertainty in the orientation of the Earth has not been allowed for in the prediction uncertainty - mainly because the effect is usually very small. However when the asteroid motion across the Earth is slow, the effect can be significant. This version adjusts the 1-sigma uncertainty lines, and the predicted uncertainty at a location, for this effect. This correction has immediate relevance for the occultation by Philosophia in Europe on May 2. The 1-sigma uncertainty lines are several 10's of km further separated from the central path. And the event probability within the path drops in value by about 3% - from about 28% to 25%.

Other changes included are:

- on the main form, access to the 7-Timer weather prediction for your 'home' site (limited to cloud and temperature). This provides ready access to a 3-day cloud forecast.

- for lunar occultations, provided some base functionality for reporting double star observations - including the ability to copy and paste a LiMovie light curve directly into an email message from the

clipboard..

Dave Herald

Canberra, Australia

Details of 2009 Planetary Society Gene Shoemaker Near Earth Object grants to Russell Durkee of Minn., Robert E. Holmes, Jr of Ill., and Gary Hug of Kansas can be found here.

An updated list of Damocloids can be found here.

A procedure developed by Adam Block and Ron Wodaski describing the use of Astrometrica can be accessed here.

A minor update of OccultWatcher and the IOTA Reporting Addin has been released. It can be accessed via Help/Check for updates and following the link to update. All resolved issues are minor except for a bug where version 1.0 of the IOTA Reporting Addin would fill in incorrectly the UCAC2 star number in the excel reports in some cases.

The New Horizons team is fondly remembering Venetia Burney Phair, the “little girl” who named Pluto, who died April 30 at her home in England at age 90. “Venetia's interest and success in naming Pluto as a schoolgirl caught the attention of the world and earned her a place in the history of planetary astronomy that lives on,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern. In 2006, the New Horizons team named the spacecraft's student dust counter instrument in her honor, calling it the "Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter." For the full story, visit:  http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/20090508.php.

The Astronomer reports; (6708) BOBBIEVAILE. D. Pray, Carbuncle Observatory, W. Brookfield, MA, U.S.A. et. al., report that photometric observations obtained Apr. 16 to May 3 reveal that minor planet (6708) is a binary system with an orbital period of 24.7 hr according to CBET 1794. The primary shows a period of 8.221 +/- 0.002 hr, assuming a bi-modal light curve, and it has a light curve amplitude of 0.08 mag, suggesting a nearly spheroidal shape. Mutual eclipse/occultation events with a depth of 0.31 mag indicate a lower limit on the secondary-to-primary mean-diameter ratio of 0.57.

The UK Spaceguard Centre in Knighton run by Jay Tate has a new telescope

Minor Planet Bulletin issue 36-3 (2009 July-September) is available as a free PDF download

Asteroid discovery statistics can be accessed here. Amateurs are still doing quite well it would seem.

From the Minor planet Mailing List

May 20, 2009
Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov
Jim Scott
University of Colorado, Boulder
303-492-3114
jim.scott@colorado.edu
RELEASE: 09-111
NASA STUDY SHOWS ASTEROIDS MAY HAVE ACCELERATED LIFE ON EARTH
WASHINGTON -- A NASA-funded study indicates that an intense asteroid bombardment nearly 4 billion years ago may not have sterilized the early Earth as completely as previously thought. The asteroids, some the size of Kansas, possibly even provided a boost for early life. The study focused on a particularly cataclysmic occurrence known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, or LHB. This event occurred approximately 3.9 billion years ago and lasted 20 to 200 million years. In a letter published in the May 21 issue of Nature magazine titled "Microbial Habitability of the Hadean Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment," Oleg Abramov and Stephen J. Mojzsis, astrobiologists at the University of Colorado's Department of Geological Sciences, report on the results of a computer modeling project designed to study the heating of Earth by the bombardment. Results from their project show that while the Late Heavy Bombardment might have generated enough heat to sterilize Earth's surface, microbial life in subsurface and underwater environments almost certainly would have survived. "Exactly when life originated on Earth is a hotly debated topic," said Michael H. New, the astrobiology discipline scientist and manager of the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These findings are significant because they indicate that if life had begun before the LHB or some time prior to 4 billion years ago, it could have survived in limited refuges and then expanded to fill our world." "Our new results point to the possibility life could have emerged about the same time that evidence for our planet's oceans first appears," said Mojzsis, principal investigator of the project. A growing scientific consensus is that during our solar system's formation, planetary bodies were pummeled by debris throughout the Late Heavy Bombardment. A visual record of the event is preserved in the form of the scarred face of our moon. On Earth, all traces of the bombardment appear to have been erased by rock recycling forces like weathering, volcanoes or other conditions that cause the crust to move or change. Surface habitats for microbial life on early Earth would have been destroyed repeatedly by the bombardment. However, at the same time, impacts could have created subsurface habitats for life, such as extensive networks of cracks or even hydrothermal vents. Any existing
microbial life on Earth could have found refuge in these habitats. If life had not yet emerged on Earth by the time of the bombardment, these new subsurface environments could have been the place where
terrestrial life emerged. "Even under the most extreme conditions we imposed on our model, the bombardment could not have sterilized Earth completely," said Abramov, lead author of the paper. "Our results are in line with the scientific consensus that hyperthermophilic, or 'heat-loving,' microbes could have been the earliest life forms on Earth, or survivors from an even more ancient biosphere. The results also support the potential for the persistence of microbial biospheres on other planetary bodies whose surfaces were reworked by the bombardment, including Mars." NASA's Astrobiology Program's Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., through its support of NASA's Postdoctoral Program, provided funding for this research. The Astrobiology Program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.
For more information about NASA's astrobiology activities, visit: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov

If you are interested in Solar System dynamics then give Solex a try.

AIP4WIN version 2.3.0 is now available.

LISA, the joint NASA/ESA mission to study gravitational waves may be able to measure the mass of nearby asteroids. Passing asteroids may cause the three LISA satellites to wobble in a small but distinctive way. The paper will be published in Classical and Quantum Gravity – http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0264-9381/26/8/085003

ESO 16/09 – Science Release. A new study published in Nature this week reveals that asteroid surfaces age and redden much faster than previously thought — in less than a million years, the blink of an eye for an asteroid. This study has finally confirmed that the solar wind is the most likely cause of very rapid space weathering in asteroids. This fundamental result will help astronomers relate the appearance of an asteroid to its actual history and identify any after effects of a catastrophic impact with another asteroid.

The STEREO spacecraft are entering the Earth’s L4 and L5 points which may hold small asteroids which could be leftovers from the collision between the Earth and a Mars sized body 4.5 billion years ago. More detail.

Peter Jenniskens led an expedition into the Nubian desert to recover hundreds of fragments from asteroid 2008 TC3 that exploded over the skies of Sudan last October. Astronomy Now interview

For the last two years, astronomers have suspected that a nearby white dwarf star called GD 362 was "snacking" on a shredded asteroid. Now, an analysis of chemical "crumbs" in the star's atmosphere conducted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has confirmed this suspicion. Read more and more

Websites of interest that have been added to the Links page;

Minor Planet Lightcurve Data collected by Frederick Pilcher, a member of The Astronomical Society of Las Cruces

Bagnall Beach Observatory

Astrometry ‘how-to’ by Tim Spahr of the Minor Planet Center

Portal to the universe. Although not an asteroid specific site it does include asteroid info and, as they say, much, much, more!!!

See the Meetings and Space Missions pages for additions and updates

The News archive can be accessed here

Roger Dymock

Web Site Manager, Asteroids and Remote Planets Section, British Astronomical Association

Email; roger.dymock(at)ntlworld.com (please replace (at) with @)

Table of Contents