2368 Beltrovata
asteroid
2368 Beltrovata, provisional designation 1977 RA, is an eccentric stony asteroid and near-Earth object of the Amor group, approximately 2.7 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 4 September 1977, by Swiss astronomer Paul Wild at Zimmerwald Observatory near Bern, Switzerland. The asteroid was named for Betty Tendering, a friend of author Gottfried Keller.
Orbit and classification
Beltrovata orbits the Sun in the inner main-belt at a distance of 1.2–3.0 AU once every 3 years and 1 month (1,116 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.41 and an inclination of 5° with respect to the ecliptic.
As an Amor asteroid, it approaches the orbit of Earth from the outside but does not cross it. It has an Earth minimum orbit intersection distance of 0.2334 AU (34,900,000 km), which corresponds to 90.9 lunar distances. The asteroid's observation arc began with its official discovering observation at Zimmerwald.
Physical characteristics
In the Tholen classification Beltrovata is a SQ-type asteroid, an intermediate between the common S-type and Q-type asteroids.
Rotation period
A first rotational lightcurve of Beltrovata was obtained from photoelectric observations made by U.S. astronomers Edward Bowell and Schelte Bus in the 1970s (IAUC 3111), and gave a rotation period of 5.9 hours with a brightness variation of 0.84 magnitude (U=n.a.).
“2368 Beltrovata” enters the record as asteroid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Beltrovata and asteroid can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q148816. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “2368 Beltrovata” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.