External links
- C/2006 S3 at the JPL Small-Body Database
- C/2006 S3 (LONEOS) at Seiichi Yoshida's website
| Discovery [1] | |
|---|---|
| Discovered by | LONEOS Georgi Mandushev |
| Discovery site | Lowell Observatory |
| Discovery date | 19 September 2006 |
| Designations | |
| CK06S030 | |
| Orbital characteristics [2] | |
| Epoch | 22 April 2012 (JD 2456039.5) |
| Observation arc | 14.18 years |
| Earliest precovery date | 13 October 1999 |
| Number of observations | 5,568 |
| Perihelion | 5.131 AU |
| Eccentricity | 1.00352 |
| Inclination | 166.03 |
| 38.371° | |
| Argument of periapsis | 140.13° |
| Last perihelion | 16 April 2012 |
| TJupiter | –2.728 |
| Earth MOID | 4.131 AU |
| Jupiter MOID | 0.146 AU |
| Physical characteristics [3] [4] | |
Mean radius | 5.019±0.385 km |
| 0.1 (assumed) | |
| Comet total magnitude (M1) | 6.1 |
| Comet nuclear magnitude (M2) | 8.4 |
C/2006 S3 (LONEOS) is a distant hyperbolic comet that made its last perihelion on 16 April 2012. It is one of 18 comets discovered by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS) program.
On 19 September 2006, the comet was discovered as a 19th-magnitude object from CCD images taken by Georgi Mandushev as part of the Lowell Observatory's LONEOS program. [1] The observatory's 1.1 m (3.6 ft) telescope revealed a moderately condensed coma about 11 arcseconds in diameter, which was slightly asymmetrical towards the east. [1] Precovery images showed that the Catalina Sky Survey had observed the comet about two days prior on 17 September, allowing the first orbital calculations to be published. [5]
At the time of discovery, the comet was around 14.3 AU (2.14 billion km) from the Sun, at that time the greatest distance of any known comet with detectable activity. [6] Precovery observations from 1999 showed that it even produced cometary activity at a distance of 26.14 AU (3.910 billion km)! [6] These records were later surpassed by both C/2010 U3 (Boattini) and C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli–Bernstein) in the following years.
