News item All news
ESA contributes to Gault's activity identification
neo admin image

neo admin

A few months ago a long thin tail was noticed on main belt asteroid (6478) Gault.

An international collaboration led by scientists of the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii published a paper today explaining the mechanism that led to this sudden onset of activity. Their paper is based on data from various observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope. Our team at NEOCC also contributed to the observational effort, providing lightcurve data obtained with ESA's Optical Ground Station.

More details on the story can be found at https://spacetelescope.org/news/heic1906/ and in the full science paper linked therein.