Asteroid 39382 Opportunity (2696 P-L) was discovered on September 24, 1960, by Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld, Cornelis Johannes van Houten and Tom Gehrels. The asteroid was spotted by examining photographic plates taken by telescopes at the Palomar Observatory.
39382 Opportunity is part of a small group of asteroids that make up the Hilda group located between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroids share a 3:2 orbital resonance with Jupiter, meaning that for every 2 orbits Jupiter completes around the Sun, the asteroids will complete 3 orbits. It has a diameter of approximately 3–7 km (1.9–4.4 mi) and takes about 7.9 years to orbit the Sun. The asteroid's orbit does not cross the path of any of the planets and therefore it will not be pulled out of orbit by Jupiter's gravitational field. As a result of this, it is likely that the asteroid will remain in a stable orbit for thousands of years.
On October 11, 2004, following a proposal by van Houten-Groeneveld in 2002, it was named after the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity †.
Famous quotes containing the word opportunity:
“... the next war will be a war in which people not armies will suffer, and our boasted, hard-earned civilization will do us no good. Cannot the women rise to this great opportunity and work now, and not have the double horror, if another war comes, of losing their loved ones, and knowing that they lifted no finger when they might have worked hard?”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)