What makes asteroid 2002 AA29 especially interesting?
Asteroid 2002 AA29 was discovered by the LINEAR asteroid search program in January 2001. Shortly after this, the coorbital nature of the orbit of 2002 AA29 was pointed out by Martin Connors (Athabasca U) and Paul Chodas (JPL). A follow-up image, taken by Kyle Smalley with the 0.75 meter telescope at the Astronomical Society of Kansas City’s Powell Observatory, is shown on the left. The image is composed of sequential exposures which were “stacked” so that asteroid is in the same spot in them all. Since the asteroid moves against the background stars from exposure to exposure, the stacking results in the stars getting smeared out into long tracks across the image. The bars indicate the position of the faint asteroid 2002 AA29. It was 0.065 AU (astronomical units, equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun) or about 10 million km away from Earth when this was taken. Note: other faint dots on the image are not asteroids, but glitches due to cosmic rays hitting the detector. These
