C/1998 U5 (LINEAR)

COMETComet

ILLUSTRATION FROM PERIHELION 1.24 AU · ECCENTRICITY 0.988

[

OVERVIEW

] COMET

C/1998 U5 (LINEAR) is a comet. It orbits the Sun at a mean distance of 102.9 .

WHAT IT IS
Comet
HOW FAR
102.9

Its average distance from the Sun, not from Earth.

ONE ORBIT TAKES
1040

One trip round the Sun.

[

OBSERVING

] FROM WHERE YOU ARE

What it takes to see C/1998 U5 (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
1043 ±200
Eccentricity
Inclination
131.76
Longitude of ascending node
66.65
Argument of perihelion
51.13
Mean anomaly
359.98
Element epoch
2451148.5000
Perihelion passage
2451169.2600
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit
0.441
Orbit class
COM

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

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

First observed
1998-10-30
[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS
  • Comet 1998 U5
  • Comet C/1998 U5 (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.

[

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. C/1998 U5 (LINEAR) [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-1998-u5-linear
BIBTEX
@misc{spacecatalog_c-1998-u5-linear,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{C/1998 U5 (LINEAR)}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-1998-u5-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 — Public domain (NASA/JPL). Citing this page does not replace citing that catalogue.

[

RELATED OBJECTS

] 8 LINKED