Rosetta Comet chaser closing in- *** GLP has discovered a new asteroid - New picture page 7, no name yet, share your thoughts ***

I was thinking maybe "Aries" or "Mikró". or

I think Aries is probably too confusing with Mars. I like Mikró, where does that come from ?

K

Mikro is Greek for small.

Thanks, but you have to consider that this discovery could be the giant mountain sized rock of doom that is coming to wipe out all life on the planet soon

K

I'm attempting to recover that streak right now, we'll see if it's a real asteroid or not...

Alright, here's the first asteroid I've found which does not correspond to the predicted position of any known asteroid; it's either a new discovery or the recovery of an asteroid whose predicted position is no longer accurate.
:myasteroid1:

Alright, good news, bad news. Bad news first, I just confirmed this was not Rosetta. Now the good news, I have discovered a new asteroid that happened to be very close to Rosetta's expected location during the burn. There's another rock out there, and I'm the first to have seen it!! Not what I was originally going for, but it's a real discovery anyway, so I'll take it. I just took another image of it using an even larger telescope. I assumed for a moment that my alternative hypothesis was correct, that this was an undiscovered asteroid. I searched for it based on the assumption of the average speed and general direction of a typical main belt asteroid... and found it in the new image. I traced back along that line and found it faintly detected in the image I took yesterday. I'll finish doing to astrometry and orbit analysis using all of these images later tonight and submit the discovery to the minor planet center. This should mark my first official minor planet discovery as an amateur astronomer! At first glance though it appears to be moving in a manner consistent with a main belt asteroid.