JUNE 2005 ISSUE
THE KEYSER FILE
Geophysicist looks skyward,
honours alberta with asteroid
Andrew Lowe, P.Geoph., finds more than oil and gas by poring over data. The exploration geophysicist is also an accomplished amateur sky watcher, and data play a big role in his hobby as well as his work.
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BY Tom Keyser
Freelance Columnist
By day, he scours complex seismic data for evidence of oil and gas below his feet. But by night, Andrew Lowe, P.Geoph., scans the skies for heavenly bodies.
A Calgary exploration geophysicist for EnCana Corporation, Mr. Lowe is accomplished at discovering and cataloguing those intriguing lumps of matter orbiting about space.
Mr. Lowe's specialty is asteroids. In fact he’s identified 69 of them in the last five months, meticulously reporting each discovery to the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge , Mass.
“When I got my first summer job, I bought a good telescope and a camera instead of a car," the University of Alberta grad says. However, the personable Mr. Lowe had already been looking way, way up for years.
He took to things astronomical after watching a partial solar eclipse in May 1967, at a mere eight years of age. He would grow into a truly committed amateur — a man who once spent 25 hours in the air to witness a 30-second solar eclipse from an ideal vantage point on Australian soil.
“It's a passion for me. If I can make a few discoveries, I'm happy," Mr. Lowe says with a shrug.
Happy 100th, Alberta
Among his prize finds is an asteroid officially recognized by the Minor Planet Center as Albertacentenary (more prosaically known as No. 85168), a typical traveller in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
An estimated five kilometres across, Albertacentenary — named, as you probably figured out, for Alberta ’s centennial — orbits the Sun every 5.7 years, following an eccentric oval path on a tilt of 21 degrees, relative to the orbit of Earth.
It’s just one of thousands of rocky bodies we call asteroids, ranging from pebble size to 1,000 kilometres in diameter. Some scientists believe they're the remnants of a large planet, or several planets, from the earliest days of the solar system.
Wherever they come from, Mr. Lowe has given them his own earthly stamp. As well as honouring his home province, he's named asteroids after his wife, Blythe, his children, and numerous friends and colleagues.
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Space Travels |
Tools of Our Times
While Mr. Lowe dearly loves to scan the skies for new asteroids to name, he does most of his spotting on a computer screen. That's how, in fact, he pinned down Albertacentenary. “I like to be independent of the clouds" is his straightforward explanation.
Mr. Lowe began calculating the orbits of asteroids by determining their precise coordinates in time-lapse photos of the stars. The shots were taken during the National Geographic Sky Survey in the 1940s and '50s, and again in the ’80s and '90s.
When these surveys came to the web, a portal opened for legions of amateur sky sleuths, including Mr. Lowe. The basic challenge is to track and lock in an asteroid's orbit, so it can be definitively catalogued.
He takes particular pleasure in the computational aspects of his hobby, a personal characteristic he traces back to his university days. Pure theory always bored him, but the juices started flowing when practical application came into play.
“I enjoy mathematics and computation in the applied sense. It's the same kind of satisfaction you get from seismic: using mathematical principles to drill wells and to find oil and gas," he explains. “You use a similar approach to discover an asteroid, calculating where it's going to be a week, a month or a year from now.”
More recently, Mr. Lowe has been purchasing bulk time on a computer-controlled telescope in New Mexico . The observatory supplies him with celestial photos, which he then processes, scans and charts, often staying up well past midnight .
Beating the Robot
There's a competitive side to this perpetual sky search. Amateur observers get a special kick from reporting a new object before it’s spotted by a half-dozen robotic sky surveys, sponsored by the U.S. government, which sleeplessly sweep the heavens.
More than 99,900 asteroids have been catalogued. Who will identify No. 100,000?
Don’t bet against Andrew Lowe.