2429 Schürer
2429 Schürer, provisional designation, is a Maria asteroid from the central region of the asteroid belt, approximately in diameter. It was discovered on 12 October 1977, by Swiss astronomer Paul Wild at Zimmerwald Observatory near Bern, Switzerland, and later named after Swiss astronomer Max Schürer. The likely elongated S-type asteroid has a rotation period of 6.6 hours.
Orbit and classification
Schürer is a member of the Maria family, a large family of stony asteroids with nearly 3000 known members, named after asteroid 170 Maria. The family is old, about years, and located near the 3:1 resonant region with Jupiter that supplies near-Earth objects to the inner Solar System. It is estimated that every 100 million years, about 37 to 75 Maria asteroids larger than 1 kilometer become such near-Earth objects.It orbits the Sun in the central main-belt at a distance of 2.3–2.8 AU once every 4 years and 1 month. Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.10 and an inclination of 15° with respect to the ecliptic. The body's observation arc begins with a precovery taken at Heidelberg Observatory in October 1915, or 62 years prior to its official discovery observation at Zimmerwald.
Naming
This minor planet was named in honor of Swiss astronomer Max Schürer, who was director of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern from 1947 to 1980. Due to his initiative, endurance, and great technical competence, the discovering observatory at Zimmerwald – after which the asteroid 1775 Zimmerwald is named – could be built in 1956. He did a lot of orbit computation on asteroids when he was a pupil of astronomer Sigmund Mauderli, who was the preceding director of the Astronomical Institute . Schürer also dealt with stellar dynamics and was deeply involved as a pioneer in satellite geodesy. The official was published by the Minor Planet Center on 10 November 1992.Physical characteristics
Schürer is an assumed S-type asteroid, and corresponds to the overall stony spectral type of the Maria family.Rotation period
In February 2012, a rotational lightcurve of Schürer was obtained from photometric observations by an international collaboration under the lead of South Korean astronomers. Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of hours with a brightness amplitude of 0.77 magnitude, indicative of an elongated, non-spherical shape.A modeled lightcurve using photometric data from Gaias DR2 catalog was published in 2018. It gave a similar sidereal period of hours, as well as a spin axis at in ecliptic coordinates.