Division III / Service Minor Planet Center

The activity of the Minor Planet Center continued generally to increase during the two triennia covered by this report, principally because of the continuing success of the surveys for near-earth objects. Chief among these has been the Lincoln (Laboratory) Near-Earth Asteroid Research Project, or LINEAR, which is credited with the discovery of slightly more than half of all the minor planets that have been numbered, although since 2005 the Catalina Sky Survey and Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona and the Siding Spring Survey in New South Wales (all three of which, together with the long-lasting Spacewatch Survey, are operated from the University of Arizona) have come to dominate the field. The total number of observations of minor planets in the MPC's files more than doubled from 14.1 million in mid-2002 to 30.9 million in mid-2005, with almost another doubling, to 55.4 million, in mid-2008.