Story submitted by Robert Bateman
In just a few hours from now, NASA rolls the STEREO BEHIND solar satellite to have a look at Comet Elenin (P/2010 X1), and if you haven’t been paying attention, it is one red hot topic topped with wilder imaginations, dooms, hypotheticals and omens than previously imagined.
From being on a par with/substitute for Niburu to a first ever hyperbolic (>1) cometary orbit, you’d be hard pressed to make the relevant data up. Perihelion somewhat around Sept 11, 2011 (maybe they changed it, maybe not) and origin from the Oort Cloud to an interstellar rogue object. Composition unknown.
Trajectory of comet Elenin. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
So, stay tuned: NASA is about to roll the cameras. Ready or not, here comes P/2010 X1 – yELEveN INe
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Add to this story: Elenin, STEREO BEHIND/AHEAD, Earth, Sun, etc. in a JAVA applet
http://secchi.nrl.navy.mil/STEREOorbit/C2010_X1.html
On one hand, I believe that nothing on a hyperbolic trajectory has ever been observed. On the other hand, a comet dropping in from the Oort cloud would like a hyperbola. Let’s keep our copies of Rendezvous With Rama handy.
Earth will bath in the Elenin’s tail.
While the coincidences of some of the alignment dates with earthquakes have been interesting, some of these Elenin/Nibiru/TEOTWAWKI people are complete kooks.
Thanks for the link to the app, rbateman. I had lots of fun with the scroll bars. Anything that close to the ecliptic is almost certainly a comet.
Sweet. This is going to be interesting.
I’ve seem mention that this thing either has no coma/tail, or a very diminutive one. If so, that would put it into a Damocloid type object.
I didn’t even know about that class until I started fiddling around with Amors, Apollos and Atens.
“Damocloid are asteroids such as 5335 Damocles and 1996 PW that have Halley family or long-period highly eccentric orbits typical of periodic comets such as Comet Halley, but without showing a cometary coma or tail.”
Wikipedia.
I’m not worried about Earth getting hit, on this pass. It’s been a long time since I did orbital calculations for a comet, but my worry is that both Earth and Jupiter, based on visual inspection, will slow Elenin down, drawing it into an elliptical orbit. In other words, there’s a possibility Elenin will be coming back again and again, with an orbit that crosses well inside Earth’s orbit. Anybody have any idea of the size?
Maybe a glancing blow at Washington, DC. Good thing no buildings allowed higher than the Capitol.
Kahoutek was hyperbolic as I recall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Kohoutek
There’s so much Internet crap on Elenin, it’s hard to find anything credible on a typical search. Apparently Elenin is about 3 miles in diameter, mostly ice, and has a long tail. Closest approach is currently calculated at 22 million miles. Comet Honda will be 5.5 million miles out at closest approach. Not very close. Either one could ruin your day on impact. We should be studying these NEO objects, which are real, instead of global warming, which is socialist science fiction.
Hoser : It’s Kohoutek, not Kahoutek.
Many more comets with (slightly) hyperbolic orbits are known, for instance :
comet C/2011 G1 (McNaught), e = 1.00116
comet C/2011 K1 (Schwarz-Holvorgem), e = 1.00091
comet C/2011 L2 (McNaught), e = 1.00173
jorgekafkazar says:
August 1, 2011 at 12:09 am
Yes, that’s about what I found, a veritable sea of conflicting information. That is why I posted this story.
NASA is rolling right now, and putting some of it’s heavy space instrumentation to a very close approach.
Now we’ll see what this thing is made of.
soooo, what time exactly is the image gonna be available? im counting the minutes…
by the way, thought i had, remember earth has had three green comets pass by in the last decade or so? well i read up on it, a green comet means that comet has never come this close to the sun before and is brand new to this location of the solar system, because green is caused by gasses being burned off the comet by the sun gases which will be long gone after its first fly by of the sun,
so we have had a few green comets lately, could they be sent here by the same thing which is sending elenin? if it or honda is green im gonna get more nervous about this whole thing,
oddly enough, i researched green comets because i had a dream about them, woke up the next day and googled it right away.
things will get really interesting when it starts braking 🙂
Who on Earth (sit venia verbo) names an asteroid “Damocles”? That’s like calling a space shuttle “Atlantis”…
I wonder how close it will pass to Mercury?
Does anyone know what the eccentricity is off hand? I checked in at skyandtelescope.com and they didn’t mention it in their articles, so I assume it’s barely greater than 1. A real out-of-solar-system comet would have a much greater eccentricity, I’d expect.
One sensible thing worth reading is http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/skyblog/observingblog/119704774.html which says in part:
Some of the comments provide the links, as does one from her husband who left a typo in his personal URL, http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.org/
As for what Comet Elenin is, it seems to be just a comet, but one worth a little extra study.
What is the difference between P/2010 X1 and C/2010 X1? The text has P twice, but the picture and the wiki link both have C. Is this an odd typo, or is there really a difference? — John M Reynolds
Leonid Elenin’s website for observations.
http://spaceobs.org/en/tag/c2010-x1-elenin/
Oh, the Wikipedia page has the eccentricity, 1.0000606. It also says “Aphelion distance: ~1034 AU.” How can it have an aphelion? They also have a handy graph showing the eccentricity waffling around 1, so sometimes it hasn’t been hyperbolic. Wiki also notes “Before entering the planetary region (epoch 1950), Elenin had a calculated barycentric orbital period of ~4.4 million years with an apoapsis (aphelion) distance of about 54,300 AU (0.85 light-years).[4] Elenin was probably in the outer Oort cloud with a loosely bound chaotic orbit that was easily perturbed by passing stars.”
The sun’s gravitational field is so weak in the Oort cloud that it doesn’t take much of a delta-V to eject or bring in an object. Looks like closer in bodies will bring it down to 0.9991, so it might be back, but not for a long time.
jorgekafkazar says:
“global warming, … is socialist science fiction.”
I like that phrase!
I wonder how close it will go to Mercury?
Regarding research of solar activities:
tobyglyn, funny!