Mars-Crossing Minor Planet 2018 VL10: a Jupiter-family Comet Discovery via Citizen Science

Abstract

We announce the discovery of cometary activity emitting from minor planet 2018 VL10 in Dark Energy Camera images spanning from UT 2018 December 31 to UT 2019 March 3. The activity was identified by volunteers of our NASA Partner program Active Asteroids, a Zooniverse-hosted Citizen Science project designed to find previously unknown activity in known minor planets. Notably, 2018 VL10 crosses the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and experiences close approaches of less than 0.5 au with both Earth and Jupiter. We classify 2018 VL10 as a member of the Jupiter-family comets, a group of objects especially important to understand because they hold important clues about the solar system volatile distribution, past and present.