Of Mars, Troy, and their asteroids

June 2011: Our enigmatic neighbor and its brethren make for some exciting discoveries.

Contributed by David H. Levy

Published: April 25, 2011

The author sits with Minerva, an older version of one of his comet-search telescopes, in 1992, in front of the 18-inch telescope he and Henry Holt used to discover asteroid 5261 Eureka, the first known martian Trojan. (Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker

Back in the summer of 1990, just after discovering a comet that reached 3rd magnitude, I joined my colleague Henry Holt for three observing runs. We were both assisting Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker at the time; while they explored impact craters in the Australian outback, Holt and I handled the observing sessions at Palomar Observatory’s venerated 18-inch Schmidt telescope.

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