Discovery
The asteroid was discovered on November 20, 2007 by Andrea Boattini of the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey on Mount Lemmon, near Tucson, Arizona, USA, using a 1.5m telescope. It was discovered in the constellation Taurus at an apparent magnitude of +20. This is about 400,000 times fainter than most people can see with the naked eye on a dark night far from city lights. It was discovered nineteen days after passing near the Earth. By the time it arrived at Mars it had an apparent magnitude of roughly +26 and therefore appeared over 100x fainter than at the time of discovery.
Read more about this topic: 2007 WD5
Famous quotes containing the word discovery:
“As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son’s future are counting on me.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“Next to the striking of fire and the discovery of the wheel, the greatest triumph of what we call civilization was the domestication of the human male.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)