The OCA – Campos dos Amarais Observatory administered by Leonardo Amaral has discovered its first asteroid at dawn of the monday (16). The discovery is still very recent and requires more data to have a more accurate orbit and estimative of its size and mass. But from the preliminary data, it is an asteroid of the main belt (between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter) and can have a diameter between 4 and 10 km.

First imagens of OCA0AC4 asteroid

The object, preliminarily named OCA0AC4, was detected firstly at 1:52 am of this July 16 in the direction of the Indus Constellation,  moving at an angular velocity of 0.22 deg/day. In the next day, after perceive that the registered object did not seems be any known asteroids, Leonardo scheduled a scan to be performed the next night along with Cristovão Jacques, of SONEAR. The search was successful and with the observations of the two days, it was possible to obtain an arc of 24.85 hours of observations, enough to ensure that it is not an object with a known orbit. But there is still a possibility that it is an object that was previously discovered but has not been registered for a long time.

Anyway, it is already Leonardo’s first great contribution to the research and tracking of asteroids. Product of a beautiful work, intense and totally voluntary, in an activity of fundamental mater for the risks mapping of a future impact with the Earth.

The Campos dos Amarais Observatory is located in Bilac city, in São Paulo – Brazil, and is operated by Leonardo Amaral, who is also a member of BRAMON and the main responsible for the discovery of more than 100 new meteor showers in 2017. Such discoveries only were made possible by the software “Enconitor” developed by him, which will be presented this year at the International Conference on Meteors in Slovakia.