Talk:List of asteroid close approaches to Earth in 2018

Latest comment: 5 years ago by Exoplanetaryscience in topic Incorrect discovery dates

Incorrect discovery dates edit

When originally adding discovery dates it appears I made a couple of critical errors:

  • 2018 CC: date used was from a precovery observation prior to discovery.
  • 2018 CS1: looks like copy / paste of erroneous date for 2018 CC

These two objects were the only ones in 2018 with discovery dates more than a week before closest approach, but now that the discovery dates have been corrected there are (currently) no objects discovered more than a week prior to closest approach. I've updated the pie chart on this page and also the bar graph on the List of asteroid close approaches to Earth page.

As a follow up, I've done an audit of all the MPC links to make sure the discovery dates in this page match the source. 2018 LA has no discovery date on MPC but is well documented due to impacting. Please note I did not include objects with a temporary designation in the audit because unfortunately I can't see archive.is, however as those discovery dates were entered by editors far more expert than me, they are much less likely to be in error.

During the audit I also noticed that 2018 CC passed Earth about an hour after 2018 CF2 and so have swapped their order in the table. Finally there were a couple of errors in the references for 2018 RR1 which I've fixed. A relief to see that I'm not the only one making mistakes.

I do apologise for my initial incorrect edits. Thanks go to Rfassbind for documenting the two day period between discovery and closest approach on the 2018 CC page which alerted me to my error. Rafflesgluft (talk) 10:44, 10 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

You know, back when I made this correction I never thought we'd be here with less than a month left to go and still no asteroids discovered more than a week in advance (ignoring the two catalogued objects). Here's hoping we manage to spot at least one over a week before it arrives before the end of the year! Rafflesgluft (talk) 09:30, 26 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

We've had a few close calls recently. We might find something interesting soon, there's still a whole month to go, and November has already been unusually active.exoplanetaryscience (talk) 04:21, 30 November 2018 (UTC)Reply