C/2006 S3 (LONEOS)

Not to be confused with Saturn's moon called S/2006 S 3.

For other comets of the same name, see Comet LONEOS.

C/2006 S3 (LONEOS) is a distant hyperbolic comet that made its last perihelion on 16 April 2012. It is one of 18 comets discovered by the Lowell Observatory Near-Earth-Object Search (LONEOS) program.

C/2006 S3 (LONEOS)

Discovery[1]
Discovered by	LONEOS Georgi Mandushev
Discovery site	Lowell Observatory
Discovery date	19 September 2006
Designations
Alternative designations	CK06S030
Orbital characteristics[2]
Epoch	22 April 2012 (JD 2456039.5)
Observation arc	14.18 years
Earliest precovery date	13 October 1999
Number of observations	5,568
Perihelion	5.131 AU
Eccentricity	1.00352
Inclination	166.03
Longitude of ascending node	38.371°
Argument of periapsis	140.13°
Last perihelion	16 April 2012
TJupiter	–2.728
Earth MOID	4.131 AU
Jupiter MOID	0.146 AU
Physical characteristics[3][4]
Mean radius	5.019±0.385 km
Geometric albedo	0.1 (assumed)
Comet total magnitude (M1)	6.1
Comet nuclear magnitude (M2)	8.4

Observational history

Discovery

On 19 September 2006, the comet was discovered as a 19th-magnitude object from CCD images taken by Georgi Mandushev as part of the Lowell Observatory's LONEOS program.^[1] The observatory's 1.1 m (3.6 ft) telescope revealed a moderately condensed coma about 11 arcseconds in diameter, which was slightly asymmetrical towards the east.^[1] Precovery images showed that the Catalina Sky Survey had observed the comet about two days prior on 17 September, allowing the first orbital calculations to be published.^[5]

At the time of discovery, the comet was around 14.3 AU (2.14 billion km) from the Sun, at that time the greatest distance of any known comet with detectable activity.^[6] Precovery observations from 1999 showed that it even produced cometary activity at a distance of 26.14 AU (3.910 billion km)!^[6] These records were later surpassed by both C/2010 U3 (Boattini) and C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli–Bernstein) in the following years.