Hi folks,

I'll be posting an update to Guide in a day or two. A bit of an
emergency problem has cropped up.

Some months ago, the Minor Planet Center designated the 99942nd
minor planet. MPC held off on numbering more than this, because many
of their files only allowed for five-digit numbers. Sort of like the
two-digit numbers once used for years... hence the "A100K Crisis"
referenced in this e-mail.

It wasn't clear how MPC was going to resolve this issue. Turns out
that in some cases, they've gone to a pseudo-expanded hexadecimal
system: asteroid 100000 is stored as "A0000", and asteroid 359999 will
be stored as "Z9999". Then asteroid 360000 will be stored as "a0000",
and asteroid 619999 will be stored as "z9999". Someday, we may face an
A620K crisis. (*)

At the very least, this is already causing Guide trouble in using
the MPCORB database. I've not determined what else may be getting
confused, but I can see several possible trouble spots. I hope to post
a fix shortly.

-- Bill

(*) The A620K "crisis" will probably not happen. MPC is planning a
massive change to their observation format, to allow observers to
indicate the precision of their observations, make notes, etc.,
etc... and to store much, much larger numbers and designations. But
they apparently aren't quite ready to switch over yet.