Timur

В продолжение темы, поднятой в конференции "Звездочета" хочу разместить здесь текст сообщения МАС, касающегося присвоения астероидов имен. Прошу языковедов сделать русский литературный перевод, если не сложно!

As indicated in the Editorial Notice on Nov. 30 (MPC 43801-43802),
there were several occasions in December when staff members were on leave,
from both the Minor Planet Center and the Central Bureau for Astronomical
Telegrams, and there was as a result some delay in responding to many
enquiries and in the processing of all but the most urgent data. For
the same reason, no electronic MPS batch was issued in
mid-December, and the current MPC batch is a "minibatch" that will
be followed by an MPS batch in a few days.

That Editorial Notice discussed priorities for the MPC. Further
discussion, particularly in the Minor Planet Mailing List, seems generally to
have confirmed that prioritization, affirming that the questioned activities
do need to be performed, particularly with regard to main-belt minor
planets.

While the naming of minor planets has great popular appeal, it is clear
that from a scientific point of view the assignment of new names to minor
planets must have a priority that is low in relation to the priorities for
the other MPC activities mentioned. The 26 new names in the current
MPC batch were selected by the Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature
by a procedure of selection and voting similar--but not identical--to that
used in the Nov. 1 MPCs. Nevertheless, the majority feeling in the
CSBN has been that this committee should concentrate on eliminating a small
number of bad names, rather than on accepting a small number of good ones.
Of course, this feeling does not solve the problem, brought up in the Nov. 1
Editorial Notice (MPC 43737-43739), of editing and otherwise attending
to the increasing number of name proposals. Most of the other names that have
already been proposed are therefore likely to appear in future MPC
batches, although there will be some delay, possibly considerable, and this
will carry forward into the handling of proposals of names submitted in the
future. The most innovative suggestion for attending to names and citations
in the future involves the use of a website for the submission of names,
as well as for the editing of citations and the judging by the CSBN, but it
will take some time to establish this, should this route be followed.

Returning to the matter of MPC funding, one MPML contributor remarked that
the MPC should make a competitive proposal for funding at a national level in
the same way other research proposals are made. This is reasonable for
scientific activities related to the MPC, but the point is that most of what
the MPC does is service, not science. Inasmuch as this service
goes to observing programs in the U.S. that are funded by NASA, it is
clearly appropriate that much of the funding should come from NASA, either
directly or through these individual observing programs. But the MPC
serves the international community, and international funding is therefore
also appropriate, a point that was made in the recommendations of both the
U.K. Task Force and the Seville Workshop. In this connection, we must
apologize to the International Astronomical Union for suggesting that it has
not lived up to its part of the contract with the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory: the IAU has been seeking support for the MPC, but so far not
with success.

There remains the point, however, as to how far professional sources of
funding should be used to pay for the services the MPC supplies to amateur
astronomers. It is precisely because of this that the MPC has traditionally
made a charge for its services, that charge being in the form of
subscriptions to MPC publications. This process worked very well in the
days of exclusively printed publication, but--as has also been remarked
upon in the MPML--it is really rather unsatisfactory in these days when
information is very widely distributed electronically. It is this single
fact that has caused most of the funding problem for the MPC. It is also
why the suggestion was made that those--even amateur astronomers--who
submit observations to the MPC should pay more directly for the processing
of their observations. While this idea was rather better received in the
MPML, some amateurs have understandably balked at the idea of this
additional expense, over and above the considerable sacrifice they make
to acquire their observing equipment in the first place.

There remains the option of donations. While it seems unlikely that these
could be sufficiently extensive to fund fully even one staff member, all
donations, which can be made as charitable gifts (and are therefore
tax deductible, at least in the U.S.) to SAO in the name of the MPC, are
very much appreciated. Continuing our policy of acknowledging such
donations in the MPCs, we wish to show our appreciation of recent
contributions from M. Dawson (Luxembourg) and D. Dixon (New Mexico).