Bagnall Beach Observatory

MPC Observatory Code 433

Professor  Michael Shepard, Ph.D., from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania was undertaking radar observations of asteroid 71 Niobe at Arecibo Radio Observatory and sought optical observations in support of the determination of the asteroid’s rotation period. Collaborators included Brian Warner in the U.S.A., myself in Australia and Marek Husárik in the Slovak Republic, with assistance from Dr Alan Harris of the Space Science Institute in the USA and Dr Petr Pravec of the Astronomical Institute in the Czech Republic. The outcome was a change in the asteroid’s measured rotation rate from 14.38 hours to 35.608 hours +/- 0.012 hours.

 

This project has now been written up in Warner, Shepard, Harris, Pravec, Crawford and Husárik, Analysis of the Lightcurve of 71 Niobe.in  The Minor Planet Bulletin Vol 33, Number 4, 2006 October-December pages 102-103.

71 Niobe—Lightcurve