Minor Planet Center

On St. Patrick's Day, while searching for Earth-approaching asteroids with the Catalina Sky Survey's 60-inch telescope on Mount Lemmon, Arizona, I spotted a slightly enlarged star-like object with a tiny tail moving through the constellation of Virgo.

After checking to see that it was not a known comet, I sent my discovery observations along with a description of its coma and tail to the Minor Planet Center.

Turns out that it had been observed as a moving point of light but not noticed to be a comet by the Pan-STARRS group in Hawaii three months earlier.

Given the Pan-STARRS historical observations, along with those from other observatories around the world, it only took scientists at the Minor Planet Center two days of additional observations to verify it to be a newly discovered comet.

Since the naming rules state that a comet should be named after the first observer that identified it to be a comet, it was given the name C2018F1 Grauer.

In December of 2018 and July of 2019, Comet C-2018-F1 Grauer, which I share with my wife Annie Grauer, will be closest to the Earth on its 5,555-year orbital path about our Sun.

NASA's JPL Scout and ESA's Mercant Systems used these data to predict this tiny object would enter the Earth's atmosphere between Australia and Papua New Guinea.

These four data points seemed to match in orbit, which aligned with some archival observations from the Palomar Zwicky Transient Facility and the Minor Planet Center named the object 2026 JN4.

In all, the data only covered the asteroid's path for the 5 hours and 36 minutes before the predicted impact at 13 hours 44 minutes UTC on May 15th of 2026.

The weather conditions at observing sites in Hawaii and elsewhere was poor, and no confirming observations prior to impact were obtained.

The provisional designation contained a remarkable coincidence that led to its permanent name.

The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on January 25th, 2005.

What is the name of this asteroid, and who was it named in memory of? Now, even if you don't tell me the complete name of the asteroid, if you can tell me the person who it is named after and the connection, I will accept it as a correct answer.

Um, you said it was discovered in 2001, so initially I was-

DA42.He immediately saw the triple significance.

2001 was the year Douglas Adams died, DA was his initials, and 42 was the absurdly meaningful number from his famous book.

It was like an almost cosmic tribute, and it was announced officially by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center on January 25, 2005, and now Douglas Adams has an own asteroid named after him.

He has his own asteroid.

To give you an idea of the asteroid traffic in our neighborhood on a mostly cloudy night through holes in the clouds in a space of less than two hours, my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Richard Kowalski posted seven new close-approaching asteroid discoveries on the Minor Planet Center's Near-Earth Object Confirmation page.

The six, which received follow-up observations from telescopes around the globe, range in size from 43 to 394 feet in diameter and travel about the Sun with orbital periods between 275 and 960 days in duration.

Eight days earlier, one of them had been imaged but went unnoticed by our primary asteroid hunting competitor, the Pan-STARRS group in Hawaii.

After Carson first discovered his heat-resistant space rock traveling towards its next hot date with the Sun, it was observed by telescopes in New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and England.

These data allowed scientists at the Minor Planet Center to calculate its orbit around the Sun, estimate its size, and give it the name Twenty-Seventeen TC1.

Twenty-Seventeen TC1 crosses the orbits of Mars, Earth, Venus, and Mercury and can come relatively close to Jupiter on its extremely elliptical path around the Sun.

It is possible that in the very distant past, the giant planet Jupiter's pull on Twenty-Seventeen TC1 centered on its current path around the Sun.

Thus, when my Catalina Sky Survey teammate Rose Matheny discovered a small space rock which soars into the lonely space high above and below our solar system's plane, it got our attention.

As with all asteroid discoveries, Rose had no idea of what kind of object she had just discovered with our Schmidt telescope on Mount Bigelow, Arizona, until it had been tracked by observers around the world.

The Minor Planet Center used the data from fourteen different telescopes to calculate an orbit, estimate a size, and give the new object the name Twenty-Seventeen TF4.

Rose's oddball near-Earth Apollo asteroid discovery, Twenty-Seventeen TF4, has an orbit which is tilted by sixty degrees to the plane of our solar system.

At this point, it was about the Moon's distance from Earth and was traveling away at three-point-four miles per second.

After Rose posted her discovery observations on the Minor Planet Center's Near-Earth Object Confirmation page, for the next twenty-four hours it was tracked by telescopes in Spain, Illinois, and Arizona.

Scientists at the Minor Planet Center used these data to calculate its orbit around the Sun, estimate its size, and give it the name 2017 UJ2.

This small asteroid had come near the Earth in 1978 but was invisible to the technology which astronomers had available at the time.

2017 UJ2 will not come close enough for us to detect in the foreseeable future.

This is what really got Kathy and me completely, is that we never really thought about it.

There's an official database and registry for Minor Planet Center that basically is the global clearinghouse of naming these things.

Worldwide, we have all these toponomists busily writing down, figuring out.

What places are called?