3494 Purple Mountain is a small main belt asteroid. It is not purple; its unusual name comes from the Purple Mountain Observatory in China, where it was rediscovered in 1980. (It had been seen but lost several times since 1962. See lost asteroids.)
Purple Mountain is a vestoid, a fragment blasted off the giant asteroid 4 Vesta by the impact that formed the Vestian collisional family. A spectroscopic analysis showed it to have a composition very similar to the cumulate eucrite meteorites.
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Famous quotes containing the words purple mountain, purple and/or mountain:
“O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!”
—Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929)
“Hundreds of dewdrops to greet the dawn,
Hundreds of bees in the purple clover,
Hundreds of butterflies on the lawn,
But only one mother the wide world over.”
—George Cooper (1838–1927)
“And though in tinsel chain and popcorn rope
My tree, a captive in your window bay,
Has lost its footing on my mountain slope
And lost the stars of heaven, may, oh, may
The symbol star it lifts against your ceiling
Help me accept its fate with Christmas feeling.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)