On 8/30/06, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/31/06, ScottL scott@mu.org wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
On 30/08/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Not a good idea since that is all we know about most asteroids and
those data would be far more
useful in a big table of asteroids, not on individual pages for each
space rock.
In fact, the basics are already in the List of asteroids tables. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_asteroids_%2839001-40000%29 We can just add to the table.
Excellent! So what we need then is a forest of redirects.
- d.
Ok, this is an even better idea. I am a strong believer in the idea that 50 articles that have no hope of ever becoming more than a stub can (sometimes) make a single good article. We might want to add links to the various online DB's that are essentially the primary sources for most of this as well. I think most of the major astro catalogs are available online now days.
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Folks,
I would be happy with that if we don't have a lot of information about them.
I suspect that over time with researchers working on studies of these bodies more information will become available about them and we will be able to expand some of them into legitimate articles.
Regards
*Keith Old* _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I'm not an asteroids expert, but I follow the Minor Planets Mailing List, IAU announcements, and new discoveries fairly closely. For most of the umpteen-tens-of-thousands of objects, all we essentially have are orbital elements, some sighting dates and positions, a magnitude, spectra, and deduced size and class. In some cases, there's not even a spectrum or officially deduced size or class.
Various spacecraft missions are planned to get a whole lot more data on some of the more interesting ones, and distant remote observation programs are being considered which would fill in a lot of the gaps now in basic magnitude / spectrum / orbital path details to high precision / etc. But it's going to be hard. Most of these are far enough away and small enough that they're only at best roughly pixel sized for Hubble or even the Next Generation Space Telescope, so getting a "better picture" necessarily means a spacecraft, and at tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars per spacecraft, the fraction of asteroids we'll visit up close in the next few decades seems likely to be small.