Comet of the Week: Ikeya-Seki 1965f
Perihelion: 1965 October 21.18, q = 0.008 AU What would prove to be the 20th Century’s brightest comet was discovered on the morning of September 18, 1965 – in a sky recently swept clean by a typhoon – by two Japanese amateur astronomers, Kaoru Ikeya and Tsutomu Seki (both of whom were veteran comet discoverers), independently …
Special Topic: Kreutz Sungrazers
The Great Comet of 1882 – a recent previous “Comet of the Week” – attracted a lot of attention from around the world from both astronomers and the lay public. One of the many interesting facets of this comet had been its very small perihelion distance, just a few hundred thousand km above the solar …
OSIRIS-REx attempting to bring back rock and dust samples from asteroid Bennu
Imagine parallel parking a 15-passenger van into just two to three parking spaces surrounded by two-story boulders. On Oct. 20, a University of Arizona-led NASA mission 16 years in the making will attempt the astronomical equivalent more than 200 million miles away. A NASA mission called OSIRIS-REx will soon attempt to touch the surface of …
This Week in History: October 18-24
OCTOBER 18, 1977: Charles Kowal discovers the first-known centaur, (2060) Chiron, with the 1.2-meter Schmidt telescope at Palomar Observatory in California. Centaurs are the subject of a previous “Special Topics” presentation. OCTOBER 18, 1989: NASA’s Galileo mission is deployed from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, with its final destination being Jupiter. While en route to Jupiter …
Comet of the Week: Siding Spring C/2013 A1
Perihelion: 2014 October 25.30, q = 1.399 AU Of the various comprehensive survey programs that have been operational since the first such programs commenced in the late 1990s, only one has been based in the southern hemisphere: the Siding Spring Survey, based at its namesake observatory in New South Wales and which operated with funding …
Special Topic: 1I/‘Oumuamua
While the details are always in a state of revision, for quite some time now the general consensus among astronomers as to how the solar system and its planets formed involves the accumulation of smaller objects, “planetesimals.” The comets and asteroids we see today, and that have been the primary focus of “Ice and Stone …