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: http://www.starlab.ru/showthread.php?t=499
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Герой СтарЛаба
Регистрация: 25.11.2000
Адрес: Москва
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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). |
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