2995 Taratuta
asteroid
2995 Taratuta, provisional designation 1978 QK, is a stony Eunomian asteroid from the middle region of the asteroid belt, approximately 17 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 31 August 1978, by Russian astronomer Nikolai Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, Nauchnyj, on the Crimean peninsula. The asteroid was later named after Soviet writer Yevgeniya Taratuta.
Orbit and classification
2995 Taratuta is a member of the Eunomia family, a large group of S-type asteroids and the most prominent family in the intermediate main-belt. It orbits the Sun in the central main-belt at a distance of 2.3–3.0 AU once every 4 years and 3 months (1,546 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.14 and an inclination of 15° with respect to the ecliptic.
It was first identified as 1951 JS at McDonald Observatory in 1951. The asteroid's first used observation was a precovery taken at Mitaka Observatory (388) in 1955, extending the body's observation arc by 23 years prior to its official discovery observation at Nauchnyj.
Physical characteristics
Rotation period
In March 2014, a rotational lightcurve was obtained from photometric observations at the U.S. Burleith Observatory in Washington D.C.. It gave a well-defined rotation period of 11.1 hours with a brightness variation of 0.25 magnitude (U=3-)
A previous fragmentary lightcurve obtained by French amateur astronomer Laurent Bernasconi in May 2006, gave a much shorter period of 6.6 hours with an amplitude of 0.06 (U=1).
“2995 Taratuta” enters the record as asteroid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Taratuta and asteroid can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1062296. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978, 1951, 1955 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “2995 Taratuta” 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.