CSS Space News

Hello all! This week, in honor of the collision of Jupiter and Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9 for short), I will talk about other things.

Another Broken Comet!?

It seems that another comet is falling apart again, but the overwhelming media attention on SL9 has buried this "less signifigant" event.

Periodic Comet Machholz 2 (1994o) is disintegrating. All in all, There are now 5 pieces of the comet, the brightest of which, fragment A, is 6th or 7th magnitude. The lesser pieces B through E range from 11th to 15th magnitude.

One can see this comet in the predawn sky. Reports have stated that the primary comet fragment A has a distinct blue-green coma that is about 15 arc-seconds across and an extremely thin tail extending about one degree to our west.

Ida's Moon Named

The first moon of an asteroid ever discovered was recently named. Photographed this August by the Galileo spacecraft, Ida's moon, now officially named Dactyl by the IAU (International Astronomical Union), was seen 60 miles away from Ida.

The orbital characteristics were difficult to determine, but it was confirmed that Dactyl was in fact orbiting slowly in Ida's weak gravity. Unknown is how Dactyl came into existance. Theories range from capture to a cataclysm that spawned both at the same time.

The name Dactyl is taken from the mythological beings who lived on Mount Ida (the Dactyli) where the infant Zeus was hidden and raised by Ida. The Dactyli protected Zeus in some stories, and in others were Zeus's children by Ida.

Magellan Gets Toasted

R.I.P. The spacecraft Magellan will plummet into the atmosphere of Venus on October 14th. What pieces are not vaporized in the atmosphere will hit the surface pretty fast. The destruction of the spacecraft will end one of the greatest and cheapest missions to come out of Caltech's operating arm, JPL.

I will conclude with an appropriate quote from Bob Dylan:

"It's better to burn out than to fade away"

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