Discovery date 25 July 1950 Minor planet category main-belt · (inner) Discovered 25 July 1950 Orbits Sun Asteroid group Asteroid belt | MPC designation 1822 Waterman Observation arc 65.74 yr (24,012 days) Absolute magnitude 13.6 Discovery site Goethe Link Observatory Discoverer Indiana Asteroid Program | |
Discovered by Indiana University
(Indiana Asteroid Program) Alternative names 1950 OO · 1943 EB
1953 MA · 1963 TT Named after Alan Tower Waterman (physicist) | ||
1822 Waterman, provisional designation 1950 OO, is a stony asteroid from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 6.5 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 25 July 1950, by Indiana University's Indiana Asteroid Program at its Goethe Link Observatory near Brooklyn, Indiana, United States.
Waterman is a S-type asteroid. It orbits the Sun at a distance of 1.8–2.5 AU once every 3 years and 2 months (1,168 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.15 and an inclination of 1° with respect to the ecliptic. Waterman's observation arc begins with its official discovery observation, as its first identification, 1943 EB, made at the German Sonneberg Observatory in 1943, remained unused.
In January 2013, a rotational light-curve of Waterman was obtained from photometric observation taken at the U.S Etscorn Observatory in New Mexico. It gave a well-defined rotation period of 7.581 hours with a brightness variation of 0.51 magnitude (U=3).
According to the survey carried out by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, Waterman measures between 6.06 and 6.52 kilometers in diameter, and its surface has an albedo between 0.264 and 0.325. The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes a standard albedo for stony asteroids of 0.20 and calculates a diameter of 7.46 kilometers based on an absolute magnitude of 13.1.
The asteroid was named in honor of American physicist Alan Tower Waterman (1892–1967), who was the first director of the U.S. National Science Foundation. He went to Washington to serve with OSRD (1941–45), ONR (1946–51), and NSF (1951–63), after being an academic physicist for 25 years. He was awarded the Karl Taylor Compton Gold Medal for distinguished statesmanship in science, the Public Welfare Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Naming citation was published before November 1977 (M.P.C. 3825).