This Week in History: January 5-11
JANUARY 5, 2005: The Kuiper Belt object now known as (136199) Eris is discovered by Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz on images taken in October 2003. Eris travels around the sun in a moderately-inclined and moderately eccentric orbit with a period of 558 years; it has one known moon (Dysnomia) and turns out …
Comet of the Week: Machholz C/2004 Q2
Perihelion: 2005 January 24.91, q = 1.205 AU Beginning with French astronomer Charles Messier and his contemporaries in the mid- to late 18th Century, the vast majority of comets were discovered visually by amateur astronomers who regularly swept the skies looking for these objects. While this means of comet discovery began to be supplanted by …
Special Topic: Near-Earth asteroids
Last week’s topic concerned the asteroids that occupy the so-called “main asteroid belt” between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The overwhelming majority of the first several hundred asteroids discovered, and, indeed, a large majority of the asteroids known today, reside in this region. However, as years went by and more and more asteroids kept …
Christina Koch Breaks Record for Longest Female Spaceflight
NASA astronaut Christina Koch set a new mark for the longest single spaceflight by a female space flyer this past week on Saturday, Dec. 28 when she broke the record of 289 continuous days in space while living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday season. Koch eclipsed …
New weekly educational series focuses on comets and asteroids
Ice and Stone 2020 is a new weekly series of educational material focusing on some of the small bodies of the solar system – comets and asteroids. The Earthrise Institute, a non-profit educational organization founded by Comet Hale-Bopp co-discoverer Alan Hale, is partnering with RocketSTEM and the La Cumbres Observatory to release the material for FREE online …
This Week in History: January 1-4
JANUARY 1, 1801: On the first day of the 19th Century, Giuseppe Piazzi at the Palermo Observatory in Sicily discovers the first-known asteroid, now known as (1) Ceres. As a resident of the “main asteroid belt” between Mars and Jupiter, Ceres remains the largest-known asteroid (diameter 950 km), and is now formally designated a “dwarf …