La Palma Research Project
Some of you might know already, but from April 20th till April 27th, I’ll be in La Palma on the Canary Islands to do some real observing with the 2.5 meter Isaac Newton Telescope. Because of the full moon, we got 6 observing nights for a respectable price, which we can use for our research projects :).
So, I’m not going to be there to burn my ass in the sun on the beach. No no… I’ll be working from 9 pm to 6 am each night on a 2.4 km high mountaintop, hopefully right above the clouds. (Yes, those are clouds you see in the picture behind the telescope ;))
Together with my housemate Annemarie I’ll be doing a research project about Near Earth Objects (NEO’s). These are small (100m - 2km diameter) rocks aka asteroids travelling in the solar system, which come dangerously close to the Earth. We are probably going to investigate two of those when we’re in La Palma.
Our goal will be threefold…
…Firstly, we’re gonna have to find the damn thing :P. Since they are so close to the Earth they travel very fast between the stars on the sky. Secondly, we’re going to investigate whether the asteroid travels along the projected path that is listed in the databases of the astronomical community and if not, we’re going to try to make corrections. And thirdly we’re going to try to make pictures of the asteroid during those 6 days at regular intervals to hopefully come up with a fluctuating light curve. This means that we are hoping the luminosity of the asteroid will fluctuate over time, which would mean that it rotates. Our goal will be to determine this rotation period.
I asked the professor last Thursday whether we have a good shot at determining the rotation period, because I had noticed that from the 25 or so asteroids that I had listed that were coming close to the Earth in April only a couple had determined rotation periods. He told me that the telescope we’re going to use in April is significantly more powerful and better than the telescopes they use to do these ‘routine’ observations of asteroids. So… that means we do have a shot at finding something nobody has ever found before… :D… The rotation period of Asteroid X ;)…
We have a handful of asteroids on our list now that we could observe when we’re there, but we’re going to be on the lookout for last minute discoveries of NEO’s since they are the most ‘uninvestigated’ ones :). On Jan 1st a NEO was discovered that will be very close in April, so it was high on our list of possible targets. However, the thing has been observed about 600 times already because it’s fairly bright. So… the rotation period of that one is already known.
So… it’s gonna be an exciting time in La Palma!
I’m looking forward to it :D.
Tijl Kindt
[…] lying to La Palma on the Canary Islands as well after I come back to do observations for a research project. During the next two weeks, I will be trying to update my b […]
April 10th, 2005 at 10:30
Massive Asteroid Slams Mars! Catastrophic Event Goes By Unaware to Scientific Community!
On September 27 (12:28 PST) a massive asteroid slammed into Mars surface, causing major damage to the Red Planet. The asteroid hit dead center on the planet surface causing the full impact of the massive asteroids force to inflect maximum damage. The large asteroid was estimated to be roughly 200 miles long and 100 miles in diameter and ripped a path nearly 2,500 miles long and 1,000 miles wide and disrupted a total area equal to the entire continent of North America. This rare catastrophic event would have remained unnoticed by residents of earth had it not been for an amateur photographer, Ralph Tate of Mesa, AZ, who was able to photograph nearly a dozen picture of the event. News of this event has not been substantiated by the scientific community as the urgent call goes out to all professional and amateurs scientists to verify and access the collateral damage caused the asteroids impact on the planet. As long as the Red planet remains intact it proposes no threat to our planet although several very large segments of the planet’s surface were blown far out into space. Scientist will need to insure that these segments propose to future threat to residents of earth even thought the red planet orbit is nearly 70 million miles from earth.
September 30th, 2007 at 17:25