2131 Mayall (1975 RA) is an inner main-belt

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 ...

discovered on September 3, 1975, by Arnold Klemola at the

Lick Observatory The Lick Observatory is an astronomical observatory owned and operated by the University of California. It is on the summit of Mount Hamilton (California), Mount Hamilton, in the Diablo Range just east of San Jose, California, United States. The ...

and named in honor of Nicholas U. Mayall (1906–1993), director of the

Kitt Peak National Observatory The Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) is a United States astronomy, astronomical observatory located on Kitt Peak of the Quinlan Mountains in the Arizona-Sonoran Desert on the Tohono Oʼodham Nation, west-southwest of Tucson, Arizona. With ...

during 1960–1971, who also worked at Lick for many years. It is about 8 km (~5 miles) in diameter. Photometric measurements of the asteroid made in 2005 at the

Palmer Divide Named after Colorado Springs founder William Jackson Palmer, the Palmer Divide is a caprock escarpment-style ridge in central Colorado that separates the Arkansas River basin from the South Platte basin. It extends from the Front Range of the ...

Observatory showed a

light curve In astronomy, a light curve is a graph (discrete mathematics), graph of the Radiance, light intensity of a celestial object or region as a function of time, typically with the magnitude (astronomy), magnitude of light received on the ''y''-axis ...

with a period of 2.572 ± 0.002 hours and a brightness variation of 0.08 ± 0.02 in magnitude. This led to a follow-up investigation in 2006, when another light curve was recorded. These observations did not indicate a binary asteroid type, but did add to the data set available for this asteroid; this asteroid is part of the Hungaria group.

See also

References

External links