Week 04
This Week in History: January 19-25
JANUARY 19, 2006: NASA’s New Horizons mission is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. After a somewhat distant flyby of the main-belt asteroid (132524) APL in June 2006 and a gravity-assist encounter with Jupiter in February 2007, New Horizons encountered Pluto and its system of moons in July 2015 – providing our first detailed view of …
Comet of the Week: (6478) Gault
Perihelion: 2020 January 2.79, q = 1.859 AU It has been obvious for several decades that the dividing line between “comets” and “asteroids” is, in a word, nebulous, and some facets of this will be explored in future “Special Topics” presentations. One group of objects that are included within this discussion were initially referred to …
Special Topic: Asteroid (433) Eros
Two weeks ago I devoted the “Special Topics” presentation to the subject of near-Earth asteroids. Up until almost the end of the 19th Century all of the over 400 asteroids that had been discovered up to that time orbited within the “main asteroid belt” between Mars and Jupiter, and the astronomers of that era were …