19 Fortuna is one of the largest

main-belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids ...

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

s. It has a composition similar to

1 Ceres Ceres ( minor-planet designation: 1 Ceres) is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid, discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical O ...

: a darkly colored surface that is heavily space-weathered with the composition of primitive

organic compound Some chemical authorities define an organic compound as a chemical compound that contains a carbon–hydrogen or carbon–carbon bond; others consider an organic compound to be any chemical compound that contains carbon. For example, carbon-co ...

s, including

tholin Tholins (after the Greek (') "hazy" or "muddy"; from the ancient Greek word meaning "sepia ink") are a wide variety of organic compounds formed by solar ultraviolet or cosmic rays, cosmic ray irradiation of simple carbon-containing compounds su ...

s. Fortuna is 225 km in diameter and has one of the darkest known geometric albedos for an asteroid over 150 km in diameter. Its albedo has been measured at 0.028 and 0.037. The spectra of the asteroid displays evidence of aqueous alteration. The

Hubble Space Telescope The Hubble Space Telescope (HST or Hubble) is a space telescope that was launched into low Earth orbit in 1990 and remains in operation. It was not the Orbiting Solar Observatory, first space telescope, but it is one of the largest and most ...

observed Fortuna in 1993. It was resolved with an apparent diameter of 0.20

arcsecond A minute of arc, arcminute (abbreviated as arcmin), arc minute, or minute arc, denoted by the symbol , is a unit of angular measurement equal to of a degree. Since one degree is of a turn, or complete rotation, one arcminute is of a tu ...

s (4.5

pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a Raster graphics, raster image, or the smallest addressable element in a dot matrix display device. In most digital display devices, p ...

s in the Planetary Camera) and its shape was found to be nearly spherical.

Satellites A satellite or an artificial satellite is an object, typically a spacecraft, placed into orbit around a celestial body. They have a variety of uses, including communication relay, weather forecasting, navigation ( GPS), broadcasting, scientif ...

were searched for but none were detected. Stellar

occultation An occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden from the observer by another object that passes between them. The term is often used in astronomy, but can also refer to any situation in which an object in the foreground blocks f ...

s by Fortuna have been observed several times. Fortuna has been studied by

radar Radar is a system that uses radio waves to determine the distance ('' ranging''), direction ( azimuth and elevation angles), and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It is a radiodetermination method used to detect and track ...

. It was discovered by J. R. Hind on 22 August 1852, and named after

Fortuna Fortuna (, equivalent to the Greek mythology, Greek goddess Tyche) is the goddess of fortune and the personification of luck in Religion in ancient Rome, Roman religion who, largely thanks to the Late Antique author Boethius, remained popular thr ...

, the

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of Roman civilization *Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...

goddess of

luck Luck is the phenomenon and belief that defines the experience of improbable events, especially improbably positive or negative ones. The Naturalism (philosophy), naturalistic interpretation is that positive and negative events may happen at a ...

. Its historical symbol was a star over Fortune's wheel; it is in the pipeline for

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

17.0 as U+1CECC 𜻌 (). Fortuna has been perturbed by the 80 km

135 Hertha 135 Hertha is an asteroid from the inner region of the asteroid belt, approximately in diameter. Discovered on 18 February 1874 by German–American astronomer Christian Peters at the Litchfield Observatory near Clinton, New York, it was name ...

and was initially estimated by Baer to have a mass of 1.08 kg. A more recent estimate by Baer suggests it has a mass of 1.27 kg. On 21 December 2012, Fortuna (~200 km) harmlessly passed within 6.5 Gm of asteroid 687 Tinette.Generated wit
Solex 10
by Aldo Vitagliano

Notes

References

External links