68P/Klemola

COMETJupiter-family comet

ILLUSTRATION FROM PERIHELION 1.76 AU · ECCENTRICITY 0.640

[

OVERVIEW

] COMET

68P/Klemola is a Jupiter-family comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 4.899 . Its effective radius is 2.2 .

WHAT IT IS
Jupiter-family comet
HOW FAR
4.899

Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.

HOW BIG
2.2

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

ONE ORBIT TAKES
10.8

One trip round the Sun.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see 68P/Klemola 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
10.84
Eccentricity
Inclination
11.18
Longitude of ascending node
175.3
Argument of perihelion
153.84
Mean anomaly
237.68
Element epoch
2457453.5000
Perihelion passage
2458799.3200
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
0.758
Orbit class
JFc

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

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

First observed
2008-04-13
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • Comet 68P
  • Comet 68P/Klemola
[

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 Database68P

    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. 68P/Klemola [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/68p-klemola
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_68p-klemola,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{68P/Klemola}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/68p-klemola},
  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