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Published online 14 November 2007 | Nature 450, 331 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450331a
News in Brief: Sidelines
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Regarding Arecibo, they were not the facility to identify Rosetta as an 'incoming asteroid'. That was done by the University of Arizona Catalina Sky survey as a part of their routine searching for Near-Earth Objects for NASA. The spacecraft was initially given the asteroid designation 2007 VN84 by the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, MA before it was realized (by a Russian amateur astronomer) that the object in question was not an asteroid but instead the Rosetta spacecraft.