Monday, March 13, 2006
Shock! Scandal!
As regular readers know, Mount Palomar (Observatory 644) offered three newly discovered observations of 2004 VD17 in the March 12, 2006 Daily Update -- three new observations from February 16, 2002. Well, they found two more from February 16, 2002 and three others from March 14 and 15, 2002 which appeared in the March 13, 2006 Daily Update. And, over the weekend, the Horizons System (telnet) included those observations and completely changed the Close Approach calculations.
But today -- JPL finally updated their Impact Risk page for 2004 VD17, and did not include the 2002 observations from Palomar! Moreover, those observations have been deleted from the Horizons System calculations:
Oh, snap! Palomar kicked to the curb! The NEODyS object home page also gives a 2004 date of first observation.
Will Palomar take this lying down? Or will JPL have to give them a serious smackdown this time? Stayed tuned, readers, as Andromeda will provide full and detailed coverage of every hair-pull, every nail-scratch, and every tooth-bite in the epic struggle to determine whether an asteroid is coming straight for us. In 96 years. Possibly. And not "straight" exactly. Except in the sense that an orbit is a straight line in the curved spacetime of a gravitational field. But even then it does quite a few orbits before 2102. But in a sense that repeated elliptical path is still a straight line. And then there's precession. But the point is, Andromeda blog continues to lead in the coverage of astronomical doomsday scandals.
But today -- JPL finally updated their Impact Risk page for 2004 VD17, and did not include the 2002 observations from Palomar! Moreover, those observations have been deleted from the Horizons System calculations:
Soln.date: 2006-Mar-13_09:00:08 # obs: 709 (2004-2006)
Oh, snap! Palomar kicked to the curb! The NEODyS object home page also gives a 2004 date of first observation.
Will Palomar take this lying down? Or will JPL have to give them a serious smackdown this time? Stayed tuned, readers, as Andromeda will provide full and detailed coverage of every hair-pull, every nail-scratch, and every tooth-bite in the epic struggle to determine whether an asteroid is coming straight for us. In 96 years. Possibly. And not "straight" exactly. Except in the sense that an orbit is a straight line in the curved spacetime of a gravitational field. But even then it does quite a few orbits before 2102. But in a sense that repeated elliptical path is still a straight line. And then there's precession. But the point is, Andromeda blog continues to lead in the coverage of astronomical doomsday scandals.
