Over 20 Years of Near-Earth Asteroid Watches

Spacewatch is the name of a group at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory founded by the late Tom Gehrels and Robert S. McMillan in 1980. The primary goal of Spacewatch is to explore the various populations of small objects in the solar system, and study the statistics of asteroids and comets in order to investigate the dynamical evolution of the solar system.

Spacewatch also finds potential targets for interplanetary spacecraft missions, provides followup astrometry of such targets, and finds objects that might present a hazard to the Earth.

September 2010 marked the 20th anniversary of the first automatic discovery of a Near-Earth asteroid using software. The discovery was made on Sept. 25, 1990 by Spacewatch, at the Spacewatch 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. David Rabinowitz (now at Yale Univ.) wrote the automatic detection software, MODP (Moving Object Detection Program), and Jim Scotti was the observer at the time of the discovery, using MODP at the telescope.

The asteroid's diameter was estimated to be between 400 and 1200 meters, but the object does not get close enough to Earth's orbit to be hazardous.

For additional information, visit the Spacewatch Project website.