07 March 2003

McCarthy Observatory Student Project Wins Honors

by Monty Robson

The John J. McCarthy Observatory, and the Western Connecticut Chapter, Society for Amateur Scientists have much to celebrate.

Lisa Glukhovsky's marvelous student Asteroid Ranging Project was chosen as the overall winner of the regionally prestigious 2003 Science Horizons Science Fair, www.sciencehorizons.org We should all be proud to have helped mentor her here at the observatory. Today she also won awards from the Air Force, the Navy, and the Army. Last Thursday she was the overall winner of the Science Horizons Science Symposium. She now has been invited to participate in both the Connecticut State Science Fair and the Symposium, the Air Force Science Fair in Dayton, Ohio, and the National Science Fair.

Lisa titled her project A Rapid, Accurate Method of Determining the Distance to Near-Earth Asteroids. The project used the principle of parallax to range asteroids during their close approaches to Earth by simultaneously imaging them from observatory sites separated by a long baseline. She arranged for imaging sessions with other high school students in Europe, with the TIE 14-inch telescope on Mount Wilson (remotely operated from here) and with established NEO observatories in California and Italy. She then found the difference in the target's apparent position from corresponding image pairs by doing astrometry on them. She developed a spreadsheet that takes the data and produces the distance to the asteroid. Her results were far more accurate than was anticipated during project planning. She was able to find distances to 3 different target asteroids, using 17 image pairs. Most of her results were within 1 percent of the distance predicted by JPL's Horizons Ephemeris Generator.

Thanks to the "peer" review, she quantified her errors and in some cases her range uncertainties were a small fraction of the Horizons uncertainty (this was true for two newly discovered Potentially Hazardous Asteroids, 2003 AA3 and 2003 BN1) Additionally, her observations and the observations of Camarillo Observatory helped confirm that BN1 was really an asteroid.

Her project and its placement in the Science Fair, in my mind, validates many things:

That there is a growing awareness of the importance of Near-Earth Asteroid research. (We hope Lisa's project helps to increase this awareness.)

That international collaborative science projects among high school students and/or amateur astronomers can make meaningful contributions to science. (These projects also add to the better understanding of other cultures and teaches students valuable lessons in how to cooperate with others.)

The mission of the McCarthy Observatory, to provide a platform of excellence in science that will engage students of the region and excite them to the joys of learning.

We would like to thank the following individuals and institutions who offered advice and assistance on this project:

Mr. Mogens Winther of the European Association for Astronomy Education
Mr.Robert Wielinga (EAAE) and his students from Utrecht, Netherlands
Mr. Gil Clark, Director, JPL
Mr. Barrett Duff, JPL
Mr. John Rogers, Director, Camarillo Observatory (670), Camarillo, California
Mr. Piero Sicoli and the staff of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Sormano (587), Sormano, Italy
Dr. Steven Ostro, JPL
Dr. Jon Giorgini, JPL
Dr. Paul Chodas, JPL
Dr. Donald Yeomans, JPL
Dr. Eleanor Helin, JPL NEAT
Dr. David Rabinowitz, Yale University
Dr. Gareth Williams, Associate Director, IAU Minor Planet Center
Dr. Duncan Steel, University of Salford, United Kingdom

Again thank you all for your contributions.