C/2003 WT42 (LINEAR)

COMETHyperbolic comet

ILLUSTRATION FROM PERIHELION 5.19 AU · ECCENTRICITY 1.003

[

OVERVIEW

] COMET

C/2003 WT42 (LINEAR) is a hyperbolic comet. Its orbit does not close: it passes within 5.191 of the Sun once and never returns.

WHAT IT IS: Hyperbolic comet

[

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.

WHAT KIND OF THING IT IS

What the object is in itself, rather than how it happens to look from here.

Rotation period: 3.31

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.

Eccentricity
Inclination: 31.41
Longitude of ascending node: 48.45
Argument of perihelion: 92.47
Mean anomaly: 0
Element epoch: 2453834.5000
Perihelion passage: 2453836.2600
Minimum distance from Earth's orbit: 4.38
Orbit class: HYP

WHEN IT WAS FOUND

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

First observed: 2003-10-30

[

ALSO KNOWN AS

] 2 DESIGNATIONS

Comet 2003 WT42
Comet C/2003 WT42 (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 DatabaseC/2003 WT42
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. C/2003 WT42 (LINEAR) [catalogue entry]. Data release DR1 (2026-08-21). https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-2003-wt42-linear

BIBTEX

@misc{spacecatalog_c-2003-wt42-linear,
  author       = {{SpaceCatalog}},
  title        = {{C/2003 WT42 (LINEAR)}},
  howpublished = {SpaceCatalog, data release DR1 (2026-08-21)},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://spacecatalog.org/object/c-2003-wt42-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

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CLASS

MASS

DISTANCE

MAG

CONSTELLATION

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