[meteorite-list] Millennium Asteroid Greets New Year

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:41:53 2004
Message-ID: <200101041829.KAA22147_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

Jet Propulsion Laboratory
January 3, 2001

Millennium Asteroid Greets New Year

NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Tracking System (NEAT), operated by JPL,
discovered the first asteroid of the new millennium on Jan. 1. This is 200
years after the discovery of Ceres, the first and largest asteroid ever
discovered. NEAT scientists compare snapshots of the same parts of the sky
to find moving objects, which may be small or faint.

Image of the asteroid available here:

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/files/images/browse/2001aar.jpg

--------------------------------------------------------------
>From the NEAT home page (http://neat.jpl.nasa.gov/)

MILLENNIUM ASTEROID

2001 AA = MBTR3F

NEAT discovered the first asteroid of the new millennium on 1 January 2001.
This is 200 years to the day after the discovery of Ceres, the first and
largest asteroid. 2001 AA is a Mars-approaching asteroid, about 1.5 km (1
mile) in size. A visualization is provided from a preliminary orbital
solution (K. Lawrence, JPL):

http://skys.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/skymorph/neo.pl?Name=2001AA&Epoch=20001230.0&M=4.71018&e=0.2886571&a=2.1090046&Peri=275.47466&Node=162.50763&Incl=13.09239&Eqnx=2000.0
Received on Thu 04 Jan 2001 01:29:15 PM PST