[AZ-Observing] Hermes in Science
- From: "Stanley A. Gorodenski" <stan_gorodenski@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 10 Nov 2003 10:13:42 -0800
The October 24th issue of Science, a publication of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science had a short piece on Hermes.
Brian Skiff was mentioned which is great. What I did not know, and maybe
it has already been discussed on this list (I am not much interested in
asteroids and so I did not follow the thread closely), was that two
years ago two German astronomers predicted its return in October of this
year. The Science article states:
The asteroid's return comes as no surprise to Lutz Schmadel and Joachim
Schubart of the Astronomishes Reschen-Institut in Heidelberg, Germany.
Two years ago they predicted that Hermes would approach Earth in October
2003, on the basis of previously unstudied photographic plates from
1937. "Unfortunately, the American astronomers apparently were not aware
of our prediction," says Schamadel. "So the recovery is truly accidental."
I checked the S&T web site releases on Hermes. They pointed out that on
October 16th Steven R. Chesley and Paul W. Chodas, using JPL's Sentry
<http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/> impact monitoring software, successfully
modeled eight close approaches of Hermes to Earth, but they did not
mention the prediction by the German astronomers. Maybe they are not
aware of it, or maybe I just have not found it in their web site.
Stan
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