[meteorite-list] Minor planet (149243) Dorothynorton

[Thunder Stone]

Rob:

Thanks for sharing the news and congratulations to Dorothy Norton.

Greg S.

----------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 3 Dec 2010 14:17:10 -0800
> From: ROBERT.D.MATSON at saic.com
> To: meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com
> Subject: [meteorite-list] Minor planet (149243) Dorothynorton
>
> 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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