31342

ASTEROIDJupiter trojan

ILLUSTRATION FROM ALBEDO 0.065 · RADIUS 23.7 KM

[

OVERVIEW

] ASTEROID

31342 is a Jupiter trojan. Its absolute magnitude () is 10.46. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 5.224 . Its effective radius is 23.7 . It is catalogued as 31342 (1998 MU31). It was discovered in 1998.

WHAT IT IS
Jupiter trojan
HOW FAR
5.224

Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.

HOW BIG
23.7

The radius of a ball that would look the same size — the body itself is not round.

HOW BRIGHT IN ITSELF (H)

How bright it would look from a fixed, standard distance — a measure of the object rather than of the view from here.

ONE ORBIT TAKES
11.9

One trip round the Sun.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see 31342 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

] 15 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.

HOW BRIGHT IT IS

What the light adds up to, measured through one filter at a time. A magnitude is a brightness on a backwards scale — the smaller the number, the brighter the object.

Albedo

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
11.94
Eccentricity
Inclination
24.41
Longitude of ascending node
102.95
Argument of perihelion
192.25
Mean anomaly
120.4
Element epoch
2461200.5000
Perihelion passage
2459741.9500
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
3.81
Orbit class
TJN

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

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

Discovered by
LINEAR
Discovered from
Socorro
Discovered on
1998-06-24
First observed
1976-11-18
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • Asteroid 31342
  • Asteroid 31342 (1998 MU31)
[

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.

[

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. 31342 [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/31342
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_31342,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{31342}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/31342},
  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 — Public domain (NASA/JPL). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

[

RELATED OBJECTS

] 8 LINKED