Word: scotty
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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XF11 was discovered last Dec. 6 by astronomer Jim Scotti , a member of the University of Arizona's Spacewatch group, which scans the skies for undiscovered comets and asteroids. Using a 77-year-old telescope equipped with an electronic camera, he had recorded three sets of images, 30 min. apart, of a small sector of the night sky. The digitized images, fed into a computer programmed to look for objects moving against the background of fixed stars, revealed an asteroid that Scotti, in an E-mail to Marsden, described as standing out "like a sore thumb...
Marsden promptly posted Scotti's data on the Harvard Center's Website, making them available to other astronomers. In early March, those data and newer observations by two Japanese amateur astronomers and a Texas scientist were fed into the Harvard Center's number-crunching orbit predictor, which spat out the 30,000-mile "miss distance" that led Marsden to make his dramatic announcement...
Gehrels heads Spacewatch, Scotti's astronomy group and one of two such teams dedicated exclusively to the discovery of threatening "near-Earth objects" (NEOs). The other group, called NEAT (for near-Earth asteroid tracking), is run by Helin and uses an Air Force telescope atop a mountain on Maui, Hawaii...
After battling security forces for two days and suffering from exposure, most of the dispirited Albanians willingly got on board more than 50 military and Alitalia flights headed for Tirana. Altogether, said Interior Minister Vincenzo Scotti, 17,466 had been shipped home by last week. But a few hundred holdouts, including army deserters, have been allowed to stay while an Italian commission decides whether they qualify for political asylum...