Dixon astronomer finds 9th asteroid before atmosphere impact
A Dixon high graduate just did what few researchers have accomplished – she found an asteroid before it impacted Earth.
Jacqueline Fazekas, research technologist at Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona in Tucson discovered 2024 RW1 in the early hours of Wednesday, September 4. The meter-long asteroid was the ninth time in human history that an object from space was discovered before it entered the atmosphere.
“We find asteroids all the time, every single night,” she said. “It’s not uncommon in the long winter nights when the nights are like 13 hours long surveying in the darkest part of the sky it’s not uncommon to find maybe 20 or 30 in one night sometimes it’s smaller than that maybe one or two every night but we we’re always finding objects and that’s thanks in part to the two survey telescopes that we run. We run at least two on every given night; one specifically looks for fast-moving objects and then our other just surveys the sky and more generally looks for all kinds of objects.”
Fazekas says it was just a regular shift at work when history happened. “I was observing at one of our telescopes as part of my shift. Part of our job is to survey the sky every night and identify moving objects from our survey images. We told the telescope where to take images, the computer comes back and tells us what it thinks might be moving objects and then it’s our job to say, ‘yes that’s real’ or ‘no, that’s not’ and submit the data to the Minor Planet Center. That night I found an object. It was a faint detection, but it looked real, so I submitted it. We submit our data to the Minor Planet Center and then we have a program called Scout where if there’s objects that have any chance of impact, we get an alert and then all the all the telescopes get an alert. It’s kind of normal to have some objects come back with a .01% chance or something like that and then we follow it up and it goes down to zero. But for this particular object, it came back right away with a 25% chance of impact so a whole bunch of telescopes all over the world went and followed it up and within a few hours of discovery we were able to narrow down the impact chance to 100% and also narrow down the location of impact.” The asteroid burned up in the atmosphere in a showy fireball over the northern Philippines.
The asteroid’s name is code for when it was discovered, said Fazekas. “The letters are part of just the asteroid naming convention. The R is for the half month that it’s discovered; all the letters except I are used in the alphabet. An object discovered January 1st through 15th, we’ll start with an A. The 16th through 31st start with the B and it keeps going every half month. The second letter comes from the number object, so the first object discovered in the first half of September would be RA and then the next would be RB. When it gets to the whole alphabet it goes back to A and then starts adding numbers, so this object, RW 1, it’s the 49th asteroid discovered in the first half of September.”
“The Minor Planet Center, the MPC, ingests all the data from telescopes all over the world. They take in that data, the observations, and they catalog it. Any potential objects that we find in a night are posted to a page with their temporary designations that any observatory can access. Then we go and we follow up our own objects, but we also follow up objects that other surveys have discovered, and they follow up our objects. Our goal is, as a collective survey operation, to get enough observations on these objects to nail down their orbit enough that we can predict where they’ll be. That’s when they’ll get an official designation and move from the letters that we gave it when it was first discovered. It was CAQT DL2, that’s a CSS temporary designation, and then the 2024 RW one is the official MPC designation.”
Her love of space goes back to childhood experiences with her dad. “I’ve been interested in space for a long time. Ever since we were little, our dad would take us outside to watch the Perseid meteor shower. He got us hooked on “Stargate” and “Star Trek” when we were younger. When I was in high school, I wanted to do aerospace engineering but when I got to college I switched to astronomy and astrophysics. I didn’t have in my mind that I wanted to be an astronomer or anything like that, but looking for jobs in my field, my first job out of college was here at CSS. I consider myself very fortunate that I had the opportunities like I had in college. Embry-Riddle (Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach), they have a telescope, so I did some observational strategy in college. I had some experience with that and was able to get on this project right away.”
Some people may be concerned that finding an asteroid the day it impacts is cause for alarm, but Fazekas says it’s actually good news for skywatchers. “A lot of people, when we put out the news that we discovered an object and then it impacted several hours later, are concerned. ‘Isn’t that very short?’ It’s good to emphasize the fact that that’s actually a very good thing. The first asteroid that was ever discovered before impact was only in 2008 and since then this is the ninth object that we’ve seen before impact. Our technology is constantly improving, the communication between the survey telescopes all over the world and our response plans and things like that.”
“It’s really good too that we’re developing these sorts of technologies now and getting to see these smaller objects more and more often because that will help for later. Maybe in 50 years, if we find an object that could be potentially dangerous, we’ll have those systems in place. The fact that we’re able to see these things with the day of notice is…actually it’s a testament to our improving technologies. It’s actually very awesome.”
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