Here you will find some impressions of our work and our goals.

Asteroid (9490) Gosemeijer 

Discovered at Palomar on 1971-03-25
by C. J. van Houten, I. van Houten-Groeneveld and T. Gehrels.
 
Henny Gosemeijer (1924–1999), Dutch amateur astronomer, founded the Public Observatory Twente in 1984. He himself made many observations of satellites and meteors, in addition to his activities in popularizing astronomy. He was honored by NASA and awarded the Dutch "van der Bilt" and "Simon Stevin" prizes.

Our Dutch partners encouraged us to take these four images with the 0.4m telescope on the Teide volcano on the Canary Island of Tenerife.

Our messurements:

 See also Asteroid (12171) Johannink.

MONET South Telescope

The 1.2m MONET South Telescope is part of the SAOO near Sutherland in South Africa. It was set up at September 2008 as the second telescope of the "MOnetoring NEtwork of Telescopes", short MONET, of the Institute for Astrophysics in Göttingen. 

Thanks our AiM Project Group MONET/S got 2019 the officiel MPC-Code L61. With this code MONET/S is a certificated telescope for tracking asteroids and comets.

In spring 2020 our group will apply for the MPC-Code for MONET/N, the twin telescope at Mount Locke/Texas/USA. To do this, we have to professionally measure three known asteroids on three consecutive nights with MONET/N.
(Photo: Stathis Kafalis)

PHA: 2020 BX12

A potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is a near-Earth object with an orbit that can make close approaches to the Earth and large enough to cause significant regional damage in the event of impact. They are defined as having a minimum orbital intersection distance with Earth of less than 0.05 astronomical units (19.5 lunar distances) and an absolute magnitude of 22 or brighter.

One of these PHAs is the asteroid 2020 BX12 first observed at ATLAS-MLO, Mauna Loa on 2020-01-27 and confirmed by our AiM projekt group at Cerro Tololo-LCO A/Chile (W85) seventeen hours later (GIF-animation left / DATA / MPEC). Six days later, 2020 BX12 passed our Earth with 11 LD (lunar distances).

Using our data and the data from eight other observers, the Minor Planet Center found the following for 2020 BX12:

• absolute magnitude: 20,7 mag
• orbital period: 738.643 days
• first observation: 2014-01-05
• next close approache: 2022-02-10 with 70 LD

2020 BX12 is a lost and recovered PHA. According to current calculations, the probability of an impact for the next few years is relatively low. See: Near Earth Objects Dynamic Site