EGAD

Week in Review

Distracting week for those of us in the space biz.

First, of course, we had the will-they?-won't-they? drama of getting the Shuttle off the ground, accompanied by NASA's equivalent of the elective full-body scan, with all the problems that entails. Neat graphic there, by the way, illustrating just how often the Shuttle is damaged by debris with no dangerous effects. But that's the kind of thing the engineers find out about after a successful landing. Play the same thing on a live hi-def video feed, and administrators panic, rightly or wrongly, and despite all appearances that Discovery is undamaged.

Word on the street, as it were, had it that a Hubble repair mission would be approved after two flawless Shuttle launches, so this outcome understandably leaves many optical astronomers a bit disappointed. Others are feeling like they've been had, on the basis that under this level of scrutiny even the most uneventful flight would fail to pass muster, and are thus rather ticked off.

Then as things were settling down again, yesterday happened. You've probably heard by now about the discovery of what's already being dubbed "the 10th planet." The NY Times article has a good summary of the state of play, but yesterday was confusing. Early Friday morning emails started circulating that a new large object had been found out in the Kuiper belt -- but nobody could seem to agree on its properties. It was a little past Pluto; no, it's twice as far away. It's half the size of pluto; it's twice as big; it's the size of Mars! It has a moon that proves its low mass. And so on.

Now that the dust has settled, it's clear what happened. Two large bodies were discovered this year: 2003 UB313 and 2003 EL61. These are tricky to find, and it takes a bit of work to confirm that one of these is a real Kuiper belt object and not a background star, a closer and less-interesting asteroid in an odd orbit, or some kind of glitch. There seem to have been two or three groups working on these without much knowledge of each other (I haven't disentangled this bit yet), and when word leaked this week, everyone rushed to publicize the data they had. Thus the rush of announcements, and since nobody assumes that two Pluto-class objects will be announced on the same day, not all of the emails floating around actually gave the object's number (especially those dispatched in the rumour phase that seems to have heated up in the hours preceeding the actual disclosures).

So here we are. 2003 UB313: a little larger than Pluto, highly eccentric orbit that takes twice as far out as Pluto's orbit. 2003 EL61: 70% of Pluto's size but only 30% of the mass, has a tiny moon of its own. And there seems to be another object, 2005 FY9, running around, but I don't have any details about that yet.

All in all, a fun week.