11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR

COMETJupiter-family comet

ILLUSTRATION FROM PERIHELION 1.39 AU · ECCENTRICITY 0.577

[

OVERVIEW

] COMET

11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR is a Jupiter-family comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 3.28274 .

WHAT IT IS
Jupiter-family comet
HOW FAR
3.283

Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.

ONE ORBIT TAKES
5.95

One trip round the Sun.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see 11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR for yourself. Everything in this part of the page is worked out for a real horizon, a real night and the equipment you say you have.

[

CATALOG DATA

] 11 FIELDS

The raw catalogue values, as the source published them, with the error bars where one was published — sorted by what each set of figures is about rather than by the order they happened to be stored in.

THE ORBIT

The shape of the path, where the object sits on it, and the instant those figures were true of. An orbit is a fit to observations and drifts away from the real one either side of its epoch.

Orbital period
5.948 ±0.0015
Eccentricity
Inclination
14.42
Longitude of ascending node
238.92
Argument of perihelion
167.95
Mean anomaly
354.16
Element epoch
2459144.5000
Perihelion passage
2459179.7574
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
0.402373
Orbit class
JFc

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

Who first saw it, from where, and by what method.

First observed
2001-08-01
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 3 DESIGNATIONS
  • Comet 11P
  • Comet 11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR
  • Common name Tempel-Swift-LINEAR
[

LOOK IT UP ELSEWHERE

] 1 SERVICE

Each link carries the identifier printed beside it. Nothing on this page is a measurement of our own, so a number that disagrees with one of these is worth reporting — and a service that has never catalogued this object under this name will say so plainly.

  • JPL Small-Body Database11P

    The orbit these elements were taken from, with its uncertainty, its close approaches and every observation behind the fit.

[

CITE THIS PAGE

] DR1

This page is live and its numbers move when an upstream refreshes, so the citation names the release the rows belong to rather than the day you read them. The release itself is frozen, republished as a bundle, and is what a data-availability statement should point at.

PLAIN TEXT
SpaceCatalog. 11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/11p-tempel-swift-linear
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_11p-tempel-swift-linear,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/11p-tempel-swift-linear},
  note         = {Catalogue entry, data release DR1 (2026-08-21). Values from JPL Small-Body Database.}
}

The values above were taken from JPL Small-Body Database — No licence stated; citation requested. Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

That catalogue asks for this acknowledgement: Solar System Dynamics. (Downloaded 2026, October 1). Small-Body Database Query. https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov

[

RELATED OBJECTS

] 8 LINKED