C. Michelle Olmstead

C. Michelle Olmstead (born 1969) is an American astronomer and computer scientist.^[2]

She is credited by the Minor Planet Center with the discovery of 46 asteroids for the period between 1977 and 1990. She has also co-discovered 127P/Holt-Olmstead, a periodic comet. The minor planet 3287 Olmstead, a Mars-crosser asteroid discovered by astronomer Schelte J. Bus in 1981, was named in her honour.^[2]

When Olmsead was an undergraduate at Northern Arizona University in the early 1990s, she participated in several asteroid astrometry programs and made measurements using the existing survey work.^[2] Her lowest numbered discovery, (5633) 1978 UL7, officially discovered at Palomar Observatory in 1978, and presumably taken on photographic plates by Tom Gehrels shortly after the last Palomar–Leiden Survey campaign, had its discovering astrometric observation published on 12 September 1992 (M.P.C. 20706).^[3][4]

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