Search sky for 28537 Kirapowell

Odessa High School science teacher Jeff Wehr has informed The Record that his former science student, Kira Powell (now attending the Colorado School of Mines), has officially had a minor planetoid named after her, 28537 Kirapowell, discovered Feb. 29, 2000, by the Lincoln Laboratory Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) Team at Socorro, New Mexico.

Kira Elizabeth Powell (b. 1994) was awarded best of category and first place in the 2011 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for her plant sciences project. She graduated from Odessa High School in 2012.

In cooperation with the U.S. Air Force, MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory has been operating a near-Earth object discovery facility using a one-meter aperture GEODSS telescope. GEODSS stands for Ground-based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance, and these wide-field Air Force telescopes were designed to optically observe Earth orbital spacecraft. The GEODSS instruments used by the LINEAR program are located at the Lincoln Laboratory’s experimental test site in Socorro, New Mexico. Tests in early 1996 indicated that the search system, now known as LINEAR, had considerable promise. In the period between March and July 1997, a 1024 x 1024 CCD pixel detector was used in field tests and, while this CCD detector filled only about one fifth of the telescope’s field of view, four NEOs were discovered. In October 1997, a large format CCD (1960 x 2560 pixels) that covered the telescope’s two square degree field of view was employed successfully to discover a total of nine new NEOs. Five more NEOs were added in the November 1997 through January 1998 interval when both the small and large format CCD detectors were employed. Beginning in October 1999, a second one-meter telescope was added to the search effort.

Currently, LINEAR telescopes observe each patch of sky five times in one evening, with most of the efforts going into searching along the ecliptic plane where most NEOs would be expected. The sensitivity of their CCDs, and particularly their relatively rapid read-out rates, allows LINEAR to cover large areas of sky each night

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has partnered with the Society for Science & the Public to promote science education through the Ceres Connection program. This program seeks to name minor planets after students in fifth through twelfth grades and their teachers.

All minor planets named in the Ceres Connection program have been discovered by LINEAR. The Ceres Connection site has more information on the specific process for naming minor planets and also lists the names of honorees.