[meteorite-list] Minor planet (149243) Dorothynorton

[Greg Catterton]

AWESOME. I could not think of a nicer person to get an honor such as this, congrats Dorothy!

Greg Catterton
www.wanderingstarmeteorites.com
IMCA member 4682
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--- On Fri, 12/3/10, Matson, Robert D. <ROBERT.D.MATSON at saic.com> wrote:

> From: Matson, Robert D. <ROBERT.D.MATSON at saic.com>
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Minor planet (149243) Dorothynorton
> To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Date: Friday, December 3, 2010, 5:17 PM
> Hi All,
> 
> A little good news to share with the list on a Friday
> afternoon:
> 
> The following citation is from MPC 71351
> 
> (149243) Dorothynorton = 2002 RL239
>      Dorothy S. Norton (b. 1945) is a
> scientific illustrator
> specializing
> in astronomy, geology and paleontology. Her illustrations
> have appeared
> in
> the National Geographic magazine, the popular meteorite
> book Rocks
> from Space and Ice Age Mammals of North America.
> 
> - - - - -
> 
> I thought I sent a message about Dorothy's namesake to the
> List a few
> months ago when her citation became official, but it
> apparently never
> appeared.
> 
> As I wrote Dorothy back in July, it is a member of Main
> Belt I, and has
> a size somewhere between 1.2 and 2.2 km (the uncertainty
> driven by the
> range of possible reflectivities). If the asteroid were
> spherical (which
> of course, it isn't), it would have a volume in the range
> of 0.9-5.5
> billion cubic meters. For fun, if you assume an ordinary
> chondrite bulk
> density of ~3.1 g/cm^3, that's a mass somewhere in the
> range of 2.8 to
> 17
> billion metric tons.  (That's quite a lot of
> meteorites!)
> 
> To see what the orbit of Dorothy's asteroid looks like in
> 3D, use the
> following link:
>  
> http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=149243;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=0#orb
>  
> (It takes a little while for the Java script to load.) The
> next close
> approach to earth will be in late January 2011, at a
> distance of about
> 1.08 a.u., which will be its closest approach since 2004.
> 
> Cheers!
> Rob
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