3868 Mendoza
asteroid
3868 Mendoza, provisional designation 4575 P-L is a stony Vestian asteroid and binary system from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 9 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 24 September 1960, by astronomers Cornelis Johannes van Houten, Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld and Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory.
Orbit and characterization
Mendoza orbits the Sun at a distance of 2.1–2.6 AU once every 3 years and 7 months (1,302 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.10 and an inclination of 8° with respect to the ecliptic.
Satellite
In 2009, a minor-planet moon was discovered. The satellite measures 2.01±0.18 km in diameter and orbits Mendoza in a little more than a day.
Palomar–Leiden
The survey designation "P-L" stands for Palomar–Leiden, named after Palomar Observatory and Leiden Observatory, which collaborated on the fruitful Palomar–Leiden survey in the 1960s. Gehrels used Palomar's Samuel Oschin telescope (also known as the 48-inch Schmidt Telescope), and shipped the photographic plates to Ingrid and Cornelis van Houten at Leiden Observatory where astrometry was carried out. The trio are credited with the discovery of several thousand asteroid discoveries.
Diameter and albedo
According to the survey carried out by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, Mendoza measures between 8.628 and 9.351 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo between 0.1621 and 0.436.
“3868 Mendoza” enters the record as asteroid. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mendoza 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 Q152276. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960, 2009 and 1621.
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This entry incorporates text from “3868 Mendoza” 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.