An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Historically, these terms have been applied to any astronomical object orbiting the Sun that did not resolve into a disc in a telescope and was not observed to have characteristics of an active comet such as a tail. As minor planets in the outer Solar System were discovered that were found to have volatile-rich surfaces similar to comets, these came to be distinguished from the objects found in the main asteroid belt. Thus the term "asteroid" now generally refers to the minor planets of the inner Solar System, including those co-orbital with Jupiter. Larger asteroids are often called planetoids.
The first asteroid to be discovered, Ceres, was originally considered to be a new planet. This was followed by the discovery of other similar bodies, which, with the equipment of the time, appeared to be points of light, like stars, showing little or no planetary disc, though readily distinguishable from stars due to their apparent motions. This prompted the astronomer Sir William Herschel to propose the term "asteroid", coined in Greek as 'star-like'. In the early second half of the nineteenth century, the terms "asteroid" and "planet" (not always qualified as "minor") were still used interchangeably. Read more ...
An asteroid is a small, solid object in our Solar System, orbiting the Sun. An asteroid is an example of a minor planet (or planetoid). These minor planets are much smaller than the small planets such as Mercury or Mars. It is believed that most asteroids are remnants of the protoplanetary disc. The incorporation of these remnants into the planets during the formation of the Solar System was prevented by large gravitational perturbations induced by Jupiter. Some asteroids have moons. The vast majority of the asteroids are within the main asteroid belt, with elliptical orbits between those of Mars and Jupiter.
In the last years of the 18th century, Baron Franz Xaver von Zach organized a group of 24 astronomers to search the sky for the "missing planet" predicted at about 2.8 AU from the Sun by the Titius-Bode law, partly as a consequence of the discovery, by Sir William Herschel in 1781, of the planet Uranus at the distance "predicted" by the law.
This task required that hand-drawn sky charts be prepared for all stars in the zodiacal band down to an agreed-upon limit of faintness. On subsequent nights, the sky would be charted again and any moving object would, hopefully, be spotted.
The expected motion of the missing planet was about 30 seconds of arc per hour, readily discernable by observers.Ironically, the first asteroid, 1 Ceres, was not discovered by a member of the group, but rather by accident in 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi director, at the time, of the observatory of Palermo, in Sicily.
He discovered a new star-like object in Taurus and followed the displacement of this object during several nights. His colleague, Carl Friedrich Gauss, used these observations to determine the exact distance from this unknown object to the Earth. Gauss' calculations placed the object between the planets Mars and Jupiter.
Piazzi named it after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.Three other asteroids (2 Pallas, 3 Juno, 4 Vesta) were discovered over the next few years, with Vesta found in 1807. After eight more years of fruitless searches, most astronomers assumed that there were no more and abandoned any further searches.
However, Karl Ludwig Hencke persisted, and began searching for more asteroids in 1830.
Fifteen years later, he found 5 Astraea, the first new asteroid in 38 years. He also found 6 Hebe less than two years later. After this, other astronomers joined in the search and at least one new asteroid was discovered every year after that (except the wartime year 1945).
Notable asteroid hunters of this early era were J. R. Hind, Annibale de Gasparis, Robert Luther, H. M. S. Goldschmidt, Jean Chacornac, James Ferguson, Norman Robert Pogson, E. W. Tempel, J. C. Watson, C. H. F. Peters, A. Borrelly, J. Palisa, Paul Henry and Prosper Henry and Auguste Charlois.
In 1891, however, Max Wolf pioneered the use of astrophotography to detect asteroids, which appeared as short streaks on long-exposure photographic plates. This drastically increased the rate of detection compared with previous visual methods: Wolf alone discovered 248 asteroids, beginning with 323 Brucia, whereas only slightly more than 300 had been discovered up to that point.
Still, a century later, only a few thousand asteroids were identified, numbered and named. It was known that there were many more, but most astronomers did not bother with them, calling them "vermin of the skies".
Until 1998, asteroids were discovered by a four-step process. First, a region of the sky was photographed by a wide-field telescope. Pairs of photographs were taken, typically one hour apart. Multiple pairs could be taken over a series of days.
Second, the two films of the same region were viewed under a stereoscope. Any body in orbit around the Sun would move slightly between the pair of films. Under the stereoscope, the image of the body would appear to float slightly above the background of stars. Third, once a moving body was identified, its location would be measured precisely using a digitizing microscope. The location would be measured relative to known star locations.
These first three steps do not constitute asteroid discovery: the observer has only found an apparition, which gets a provisional designation, made up of the year of discovery, a code of two letters representing the week of discovery, and of a number so more than the one discovered one took place in this week (example: 1998 FJ74).
The final step of discovery is to send the locations and time of observations to Brian Marsden of the Minor Planet Center. Dr. Marsden has computer programs that compute whether an apparition ties together previous apparitions into a single orbit. If so, the object gets a number.
The observer of the first apparition with a calculated orbit is declared the discoverer, and he gets the honor of naming the asteroid (subject to the approval of the International Astronomical Union) once it is numbered.
There is increasing interest in identifying asteroids whose orbits cross Earth's orbit, and that could, given enough time, collide with Earth (see Earth-crosser asteroids).
The three most important groups of near-Earth asteroids are the Apollos, Amors, and the Atens. Various asteroid deflection strategies have been proposed.
The near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros had been discovered as long ago as 1898, and the 1930s brought a flurry of similar objects. In order of discovery, these were: 1221 Amor, 1862 Apollo, 2101 Adonis, and finally 69230 Hermes, which approached within 0.005 AU of the Earth in 1937. Astronomers began to realize the possibilities of Earth impact.
Two events in later decades increased the level of alarm: the increasing acceptance of Walter Alvarez' theory of dinosaur extinction being due to an impact event, and the 1994 observation of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashing into Jupiter.
The U.S. military also declassified the information that its military satellites, built to detect nuclear explosions, had detected hundreds of upper-atmosphere impacts by objects ranging from one to 10 metres across.
All of these considerations helped spur the launch of highly efficient automated systems that consist of Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) cameras and computers directly connected to telescopes. Since 1998, a large majority of the asteroids have been discovered by such automated systems.
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids have been discovered within the solar system and the present rate of discovery is about 5000 per month. As of April 14, 2006, from a total of 330,795 registered minor planets, 129,436 have orbits known well enough to be given permanent official numbers.
Of these, 13,040 have official names (trivia: at least 610 of these names require diacritics). The lowest-numbered but unnamed minor planet is (3360) 1981 VA; the highest-numbered named minor planet is 118172 Vorgebirge .
Current estimates put the total number of asteroids above 1 km in diameter in the solar system to be between 1.1 and 1.9 million. The largest asteroid in the inner solar system is 1 Ceres, with a diameter of 900-1000 km. Two other large inner solar system belt asteroids are 2 Pallas and 4 Vesta; both have diameters of ~500 km. Vesta is the only main belt asteroid that is sometimes visible to the naked eye (in some very rare occasions, a near-Earth asteroid may be visible without technical aid; see 99942 Apophis).
The mass of all the asteroids of the Main Belt is estimated to be about 3.0-3.6x1021 kg, or about 4% of the mass of our moon.
Of this, 1 Ceres comprises 950x1018 kg, some 32% of the total. Adding in the next three most massive asteroids, 4 Vesta (9%), 2 Pallas (7%), and 10 Hygiea (3%), bring this figure up to 51%; while the three after that, 511 Davida (1.2%), 704 Interamnia (1.0%), and 3 Juno (0.9%), only add another 3% to the total mass. The number of asteroids then increases exponentially as their individual masses decrease.
Asteroids are commonly classified into groups based on the characteristics of their orbits and on the details of the spectrum of sunlight they reflect.
Many asteroids have been placed in groups and families based on their orbital characteristics. It is customary to name a group of asteroids after the first member of that group to be discovered. Groups are relatively loose dynamical associations, whereas families are much "tighter" and result from the catastrophic break-up of a large parent asteroid sometime in the past. Asteroid Family
In 1975, an asteroid taxonomic system based on colour, albedo, and spectral shape was developed by Clark R. Chapman, David Morrison, and Ben Zellner. These properties are thought to correspond to the composition of the asteroid's surface material. Originally, they classified only three types of asteroids:
S-type asteroids - silicaceous, 17% of known asteroids
M-type asteroids - metallic, most of the remaining asteroids
Asteroid discovery methods have drastically improved over the past two centuries. Until the age of space travel, asteroids were merely pinpricks of light in even the largest telescopes and their shapes and terrain remained a mystery.
The first close-up photographs of asteroid-like objects were taken in 1971 when the Mariner 9 probe imaged Phobos and Deimos, the two small moons of Mars, which are probably captured asteroids. These images revealed the irregular, potato-like shapes of most asteroids, as did subsequent images from the Voyager probes of the small moons of the gas giants.
The first true asteroid to be photographed in close-up was 951 Gaspra in 1991, followed in 1993 by 243 Ida and its moon Dactyl, all of which were imaged by the Galileo probe en route to Jupiter.
The first dedicated asteroid probe was NEAR Shoemaker, which photographed 253 Mathilde in 1997, before entering into orbit around 433 Eros, finally landing on its surface in 2001.
Other asteroids briefly visited by spacecraft en route to other destinations include 9969 Braille (by Deep Space 1 in 1999), and 5535 Annefrank (by Stardust in 2002).
In September 2005, the Japanese Hayabusa probe started studying 25143 Itokawa in detail and may return samples of its surface to earth. The Hayabusa mission has been plagued with difficulties, including the failure of two of its three control wheels, rendering it difficult to maintain its orientation to the sun to collect solar energy. Following that, the next asteroid encounters will involve the European Rosetta probe (launched in 2004), which will study 2867 Steins and 21 Lutetia in 2008 and 2010.
NASA is planning to launch the Dawn Mission in 2007, which will orbit 1 Ceres and 4 Vesta in 2011-2015, with its mission possibly then extended to 2 Pallas.
Newly discovered asteroids are given a provisional designation consisting of the year of discovery and an alphanumeric code, such as 2001 FH. When its orbit is confirmed, it is given a number, and later may also be given a name (e.g. 1 Ceres). The formal naming convention uses parentheses around the number (e.g. (433) Eros), however, dropping the parentheses is quite common. Informally, especially when a name is repeated in running text, it is common to drop the number altogether, or to drop it after the first mention.
The Minor Planet Circular (MPC) of October 19, 2005 was a historical one, as it saw the highest numbered asteroid jump from 99947 to 118161, causing a small "Y2k" like crisis for various automated data services Ñup until then, only five digits were allowed in most data formats for the asteroid number. This has been addressed in some data fields by having the leftmost digit, the ten-thousands place, use the alphabet as a digit extension. A=10, B=11,É, Z=35, a=36,É, z=61. The highest number 120437 thus is cross-referenced as C0437 on some lists.
Also, the fictional asteroid of The Little Prince, B612, now could be connected with the real (110612) 2001 TA142 which is listed as (B0612) 2001 TA142 in the compacted lists - although it is already present as 46610 Besixdouze (B612 in hexadecimal translates to 46610 in decimal notation).
Sources for namesThe first few asteroids were named after figures from Graeco-Roman mythology, but as such names started to run out, others were used - famous people, literary characters, the names of the discoverer's wives, children, and even television characters.
The first asteroid to be given a non-mythological name was 20 Massalia, named after the city of Marseilles. For some time only female (or feminized) names were used; Alexander von Humboldt was the first man to have an asteroid named after him, but his name was feminized to 54 Alexandra. This unspoken tradition lasted until 334 Chicago was named; even then, oddly feminized names show up in the list for years afterward.
As the number of asteroids began to run into the hundreds, and eventually the thousands, discoverers began to give them increasingly frivolous names.
The first hints of this were 482 Petrina and 483 Seppina, named after the discoverer's pet dogs. However, there was little controversy about this until 1971, upon the naming of 2309 Mr. Spock (which was not even named after the Star Trek character, but after the discoverer's cat who supposedly bore a resemblance to him). Although the IAU subsequently banned pet names as sources, eccentric asteroid names are still being proposed and accepted, such as 6042 Cheshirecat, 9007 James Bond, or 26858 Misterrogers.
Asteroid naming is not always a free-for-all: there are some types of asteroid for which rules have developed about the sources of names. For instance Centaurs (asteroids orbiting between Saturn and Neptune) are all named after mythological centaurs, Trojans after heroes from the Trojan War, and trans-Neptunian objects after underworld spirits.