Indiana Asteroid Program

Minor planets discovered: 119 [1]
see § List of discovered minor planets

The Indiana Asteroid Program was a photographic astronomical survey of asteroids during 1949–1967, at the U.S. Goethe Link Observatory near Brooklyn, Indiana.[2] The program was initiated by Frank K. Edmondson of Indiana University using a 10-inch f/6.5 Cooke triplet astrographic camera.[3][4]

Its objectives included recovering asteroids that were far from their predicted positions, making new orbital calculations or revising old ones, deriving magnitudes accurate to about 0.1 mag, and training students.[3]

When the observatory's 36-inch (0.91-meter) reflecting telescope proved unsuitable for searching for asteroids, postdoctoral fellow James Cuffey arranged the permanent loan of a 10-inch (25-centimeter) lens from the University of Cincinnati.[5] Mounted in a shed near the main observatory, the instrument using the borrowed lens was responsible for all of the program's discoveries.[6]

By 1958, the program had produced 3,500 photographic plates showing 12,000 asteroid images and had published about 2,000 accurate positions in the Minor Planet Circular.[3] When the program ended in 1967, it had discovered a total of 119 asteroids.[1] The program's highest numbered discovery, 30718 Records, made in 1955, was not named until November 2007 (M.P.C. 61269).[7][8]

The program ended when the lights of the nearby city of Indianapolis became too bright to permit the long exposures required for the photographic plates.[9] The program's nearly 7,000 photographic plates are now archived at Lowell Observatory.[10]

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference MPC-Discoverers was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Indiana University Department of Astronomy: Frank Edmondson Home Page Archived 2008-06-13 at the Wayback Machine
  3. ^ a b c Cite error: The named reference Gehrels-1958 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Asteroids II Machine-Readable Data Base - Version March 1988, Binzel, R.P. et al., eds. 1989, Univ. of Arizona Press, Note 103: Archived 2011-08-07 at the Wayback Machine"Planets discovered by the Indiana Asteroid Program, Goethe Link Observatory, Indiana University. This program was conceived and directed by F. K. Edmondson; the plates were blinked and measured astrometrically by B. Potter and, following her retirement, by D. Owings, and the photometry was performed under the direction of T. Gehrels. During the years 1947-1967, in which the plates were exposed, a large number of people participated in various aspects of the program."
  5. ^ Ken Kingery, Betting on a Sure Thing: A "Record" Ending to Indiana Asteroid Program, Indiana Alumni Magazine, v.1, no. 2, September/October 2008, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Alumni Association, p. 46; See also, Space Daily.
  6. ^ Id.
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference IU-Records was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference MPC-Circulars-Archive was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Kingery, p. 47.
  10. ^ Kingery, p. 47, and Indiana University Department of Astronomy: Frank Edmondson Home Page Archived 2008-06-13 at the Wayback Machine