MPEC 2001-V02 : EDITORIAL NOTICE
The following Minor Planet Electronic Circular may be linked-to from your own Web pages, but must not otherwise be redistributed electronically.A form allowing access to any MPEC is at the bottom of this page.
Read MPEC 2001-V01
Read MPEC 2001-V03
M.P.E.C. 2001-V02 Issued 2001 Nov. 1, 14:26 UT
The Minor Planet Electronic Circulars contain information on unusual
minor planets and routine data on comets. They are published
on behalf of Commission 20 of the International Astronomical Union by the
Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory,
Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Prepared using the Tamkin Foundation Computer Network
MPC@CFA.HARVARD.EDU
URL http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/mpc.html ISSN 1523-6714
EDITORIAL NOTICE
[reprinted from MPC 43737-43739, 2001 Nov. 1]
We apologize to those who use our free services on the WWW for several
breakdowns in the system during the past month. As discussed in the Editorial
Notice on MPC 43423, September provided a new extreme in record activity
for the Minor Planet Center, mainly of course in attending to observations and
orbits of main-belt minor planets, including a record number of new
discoveries. The corresponding activity in October was at only a slightly
reduced level, but it was sufficient to deplete on several occasions the
available diskspace on the older computers used for most of the WWW services.
We might note that the total number of observations in our files is now very
close to 10 million, a tenfold increase in just six years.
The procedures that update the data provided in the WWW services were
still carried out on the older computers, because--rightly or wrongly--it was
considered more important for the small MPC staff to attend as promptly as
possible to the large number of new observations of "ordinary" minor
planets received every day. Although there is now in place an automatic
process for acknowledging the receipt of observations sent to the address
mpc@cfa.harvard.edu, and priority is given to the objects that are
more obviously NEO candidates, the increased burden has recently resulted in
delays of as long as 48 hours in our informing observers of identifications
or new MPC designations for the objects they report. The problem of attending
to observer reports is exacerbated by mistakes and inconsistencies in some
of the designations of the objects reported, gross errors in the dates and
times of observation, and extreme departures from the specified format that
therefore require human (rather than computer) attention to decipher. Again,
we apologize for the delays, which will presumably become more common as the
volume of observations reported continues inexorably to increase, although we
note that the current situation would be alleviated by the addition of one or
two members to the MPC staff.
With the situation near breaking point, MPC Associate Director Gareth
Williams has put in a heroic effort in the past week or two to get some of the
WWW services, as well as the production of the "Daily Orbit Update"
MPECs, operating on the cluster of modern computers developed over
the past couple of years as the result of much-appreciated gifts from the
Tamkin Foundation. The totality of activities carried out by the MPC is one
of extreme complexity, and both the transfer of procedures from the old
computers to the new and the introduction of new procedures have necessarily
been rather gradual processes, often hampered by hardware problems
(cf. MPC 42427) that would be much better solved if the MPC could
employ, even part-time, a systems manager/engineer.
Because of the above-mentioned difficulties, as well as an urgent need
over the full-moon respite from observational activity to spend time getting
additional procedures properly operating on the computer cluster, this batch of
MPCs is a "mini" batch (cf. MPC 42649). The observations
of minor planets received during the past two weeks will be published
shortly in a "mid-month" MPS batch, and they will be documented and
filed at the time of the preparation of the Nov. 30 MPCs. Orbital
elements for minor planets are of course appearing in their usual temporary
fashion in the DOU MPECs.
The MPC sometimes receives unsolicited advice on how some of its
activities, e.g., involving NEOs, could be transferred to other organizations.
With the use of The NEO Confirmation Page and both the individual and the DOU
MPECs, it has been widely acknowledged that the NEO activity is
handled very well, given that not every perceived NEO candidate turns out to
be an NEO (or even a real celestial object); that some NEOs at times
masquerade as main-belt minor planets; and that there has in recent years
been the increasing problem of recognizing when an apparently asteroidal
object is in fact a comet--the discovery announcement of which would then
be made by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, which is
conveniently co-located with the MPC at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory. Of course, other aspects of NEO research can and should be
carried out at other organizations. For example, the group at the University
of Pisa uses the observations and preliminary orbit computations published by
the MPC to make variant computations needed to recognize for its
"risk page" http://newton.dm.unipi.it objects that have a nonzero
probability of earth impact during the next century.
As was mentioned on MPC 42955-42956, one area of current MPC activity
that could rather obviously be handled by a separate organization is the
receipt of proposals of names of minor planets and the submission of
computer files of edited citations for MPC publication after
adjudication by the Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature. Following, but
not because of, this mention in the July 5 MPCs, the whole question
of the appropriateness of continuing to name minor planets has been discussed
by various groups within the IAU, including again the CSBN. Although a final
decision on the subject is far from being made, it was decided that the CSBN
should conduct an experiment with regard to the set of names proposed for the
current batch of MPCs. This was done rather than follow the advice on
MPC 42956, which was to accept only those names and citations that were
submitted in the proper form. If that advice had been followed, only 36 of
the relatively small set of 97 submissions during July 31-Sept. 10 would have
qualified, subject to the need in some cases to rewrite the citations in more
acceptable English. Furthermore, to do this would have eliminated many
very good proposals in a set that the CSBN felt was of particularly high
quality--in rather sharp contrast to the name proposals submitted for the
July 5 MPCs. The procedure followed was to ask each of the 13 CSBN
members to select (secretly) up to "about" 10 of the 97 proposals as worthy
of further consideration. The 54 name proposals selected by at least one
member were then made known to the CSBN members, and each member was asked
to vote (again secretly) for up to 20 of these names. The outcome was that
one name received 9 votes, three names received 8 votes, two received
7 votes, five received 6 votes, five received 5 votes and ten received 4 votes.
These 26 names were therefore deemed those accepted. At this point--and
not earlier--the corresponding citations were edited for publication on
MPC 43762-43763.
While there are obvious merits to the above procedure (raising the
standards of minor-planet names; reversing the fact that minor-planet naming
has become so commonplace and indiscrimate that to have a minor planet named
for one can nowadays scarcely be considered an "honor"; greatly reducing
the time and effort spent by the MPC editing and otherwise verifying
citations that are not very understandable; greatly reducing the back-and-forth
discussion in the CSBN on names that are questionable), the CSBN is well aware
that not everybody will be happy with the result. In particular, while some
names honoring amateur astronomers were accepted, they are clearly
underrepresented in the total, and names that are solely of significance to
the proposers and their friends were excluded. Nevertheless, it would be
difficult to argue that acceptance of just the 36 proposals that were properly
formatted would have been a better choice.
Since the action this time by the CSBN was an experiment, not preannounced,
it would be inappropriate to reject the other 71 names outright. Most of
these other names are therefore likely to be accepted by the CSBN for
publication in future MPC batches, with their citations properly edited
as time permits. Of course, this by no means solves the naming problem, and
the MPC has already received 129 further name proposals (again just 36 of them
properly formatted!) that will be sent late next week to the CSBN for
consideration for publication in the Dec. 30 MPCs.
So we come back to the matter of proper funding for the MPC.
Recommendation 7 of the U.K. Government Report of the Task Force on potentially
hazardous Near Earth Objects (Sept. 2000) requests that the
(U.K.) Government and other interested parties "seek ways of putting the
governance and funding of the Minor Planet Center on a robust international
footing"; and Recommendation 2/2 of a workshop cosponsored by the American
Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the U.N. Office of Outer Space
Affairs, the Confederation of European Aerospace Societies and the
International Academy of Astronautics, International Space Cooperation:
Addressing Challenges of the New Millennium (Mar. 2001), also states that the
MPC "should be put on an adequate and stable financial footing". It ought
to be clear from much of what is stated in the above paragraphs that the
matter is now becoming rather urgent. Traditionally, the MPC has relied on
the time-honored practice of generating income from subscriptions to its
services to cover a large fraction of its expenses. The recent policy of the
IAU has been to discourage funding of this type, which is in any case
difficult to assure nowadays, when services are largely provided
electronically, rather than via printed pages (even though the change from
paper to electronic actually increases the expenses, because of a desire
to publish more material and more quickly). In recent years, the diminishing
subscriptional support has been supplemented by what was first a grant from and
then a contract with NASA. While this support has become essential to the
operation of the MPC, it is not a help when NASA "stretches" a year to 19
months, and the internationality of the MPC makes it inappropriate that it
receive its entire funding from a single government.
One clause of the contract signed between the IAU and the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory on Apr. 17 reads: "Should their combined resources
be inadequate to operate the MPC at the desirable level of activity, the IAU
and SAO will collaborate to identify and attract additional funding and/or
staff for the MPC operations." Although the MPC has sought advice on this
topic from the IAU Minor Planet Center Advisory Committee on
more than one occasion since the contract was signed, no advice whatsoever
has been forthcoming. Indeed, the principal response from the MPCAC
Chair has been a statement, dated Oct. 26, "officially, on behalf of the
MPCAC" to the effect that our making available single-night detections of
unidentified minor planets by ftp (cf. MPC 43423), though carried
out as required within six months of the signing of the contract, was
"contrary" to the terms of the contract. Certainly, this first attempt
at making the "one-night stands" available was incomplete in that it did
not yet contain any observations made prior to 2001: obviously, the intention
is to add earlier data (back to 1992) as time permits them to be collected
together. Furthermore, while some may consider the "release" of the ONS
to be a high-priority task for the MPC, past experience with the ONS suggests
otherwise (cf. MPC 42955).
In the absence--so far--of "robust" or "stable" future funding for the
MPC, stopgap measures are of course welcome. The simplest measure is to
encourage more subscribers. While detailed information about subscriptions
can be obtained from iausubs@cfa.harvard.edu, we note here that the
regular monthly subscription rate for the printed MPCs is $22.50,
that for the Computer Service is $10.00, and the latter can be combined with
the Extended Computer Service (which includes all the MPC files) for $35.00.
Donations can also be accepted. On MPC 42955 there was mention of
a possible fee for processing name proposals: the amount discussed was
in the neighborhood of $20.00-$30.00 per name, and it must be stressed
that this is strictly a fee that would allow a name and citation to be
prepared for publication--not an indication that the name is being
"sold" (i.e., along the lines of the International Star Registry). Yet
another suggestion is that a fee be instituted for processing observations,
perhaps in the range 0.1-1 cent per observation, with a minimum charge
of $1.00 per e-mail message that could be waived for observations of objects
on The NEOCP.
In making suggestions for financial support like those in the previous
paragraph, we do not wish to alienate amateur astronomers, who in contributing
observations also contribute their time. Nevertheless, an amateur does
have a choice of what he or she does, and the MPC has always tried to be
meticulous about assigning credit to amateurs for their work. But all
contributors (amateur or professional) of data to the MPC, as well as those
who either make free use of MPC services or seek advice directly from the
MPC staff, should be aware of the strain the ever-increasing activity on minor
planets is now placing on a staff of 2.5 people. Remember that, after all,
if an MPC staff member is on the job after he has put in the 40 hours per week
for which he is paid, he, too, becomes an amateur; furthermore, to get the job
done, he has little choice but to spend time checking out a batch of
observations of numbered minor planets, a process for which there is scant
credit, whether or not the observations have actually been identified by the
observer.
When the Minor Planet Center was located at the Cincinnati Observatory it
was common for as long as six months to elapse between the publication
of batches of MPCs. And although the Cincinnati staff was comparable
in size to what it is now, the total amount of data processed during those
30 years was some three times less than what was processed by
the MPC in Cambridge during September 2001 alone.
When the MPC moved to SAO in 1978 the decision was made to issue the
MPCs in monthly batches. In doing so, we were able to maintain
the quality control, documentation and referenceability that was the hallmark
of the Cincinnati operation--and, indeed, should be expected of any work
carried out on behalf of the IAU. For more than 23 years this monthly
publication has in fact appeared, with only a very occasional month missed (and
then by prior arrangement) because of staff attendance at scientific meetings,
occasional vacations, etc. In response to the current widespread interest in
minor planets--which was never the case when the MPC was in Cincinnati--the
MPC is nowadays updating information on new discoveries of NEOs several times
a day (a task formerly handled by the CBAT); observations of NEOs and orbit
computations for minor planets generally are provided daily; and in recent
months, by means of the MPSs and MPECs, we have been
publishing fully checked observations of minor planets and the recent
comets twice a month. Obviously, we should like to maintain, even to
improve on, the services the MPC provides, in terms of both frequency and
content. But, given the intolerability of the present financial situation,
which both prevents the expansion of the MPC staff and may in fact result in
its reduction, it will be impossible to respond to all but the most urgent
communications from observers and others with its traditional almost legendary
speed, and it may be necessary to cut back on the frequency with which its
present services are updated or otherwise provided.
Brian G. Marsden (C) Copyright 2001 MPC M.P.E.C. 2001-V02
Read MPEC 2001-V01
Read MPEC 2001-V03
Enter an MPEC number in one of the following forms:
- 1997-B01 (the full form)
- J97B01 (the packed version of the full form)
- B01 (the abbreviated form)