Category: Asteroids

Asteroids

February 15, 2013

The Russian Meteor and Lessons Learned on Meteor Impacts

Almost 12h after the event, it is time to gather my notes on the Russian meteor event (#RussianMeteor) and my thoughts on this impact and those which may come soon. What do we know? (I collected these pieces of information from numerous ...

December 14, 2012

China joined the interplanetary club by successfully imaging the asteroid Toutatis

This exceptional result was brought to my attention late on Friday evening, but it clearly deserves a short post on this blog. Chang'E 2, a chinese mission dedicated to the exploration of the moon was recycled to explore the Near-Earth ...

December 4, 2012

AGU Fall Meeting – Internal Structure and Composition of Small Solar System Bodies

Third day of the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting tomorrow, Wednesday December 5, and I anticipate another busy day. Julie Castillo from Jet Propulsion Laboratory and myself organized a session on the internal structure and composition of small solar system bodies ...

September 14, 2012

No Detection of a Scar on Jupiter in the NIR

Some news about the Jupiter flash which was detected on September 10. I reported the absence of detection in the visible light from data collected by amateur astronomers. Glenn Orton, a  colleague from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,  sent me yesterday ...

September 11, 2012

Flash on Jupiter – most likely a meteor

As I mentioned in this blog, yesterday two amateur astronomers reported the detection of a flash on Jupiter yesterday on September 10. Since then, various teams have been working around the clock to estimate if this event was a meteor ...

September 10, 2012

Another fireball on Jupiter?

An amateur astronomer reported the visual detection of a fireball on Jupiter at 11:35 UT (September 10 2012) last night. It was confirmed on a video recorded from Texas. This is the 6th impact of Jupiter detected so far. Astronomer Dan ...

December 5, 2011

AGU Fall Session – Evolution and Exploration of Asteroids

There will be an oral session on Evolution and Exploration of Asteroids tomorrow from 8am to 10am, followed by a poster session from 1:40pm to 6pm, at the AGU Fall Conference, San Francisco, CA. Ben Weiss, Linda Elkins-Tanton (both from ...

October 7, 2011

Is the triple Asteroid Minerva a baby-Ceres?

The official EPSC-DPS press-release about our latest discovery on the analysis of the moons of (93) Minerva and understanding of the composition of this main-belt triple system is finally out. Two years ago, I reported on this blog the discovery of ...

July 21, 2011

An Occultation by the double asteroid (90) Antiope seen in California

Last Tuesday July 19 at 3:25am PDT, several SETI REU students and colleagues from SETI institute and Observatoire de Paris were on the road. They were looking at the sky with  tiny telescopes and surrounding by complex instruments somewhere ...

August 22, 2010

Another flash on Jupiter

Masayuki Tachikawa, amateur astronomer from Kumamoto city, Japan, reported the detection of an optical flash on Jupiter atmosphere recorded on August 20 2010 at 18:22:12 UT. You can find the video on the following link and below a captured screen. Details about the observations ...