Francesco Manca

Francesco Manca (born November 1966, in Milan, Italy) is an Italian amateur astronomer and discoverer of minor planets at the Sormano Astronomical Observatory in northern Italy.

Manca also performs follow-up astrometry of near-Earth objects (NEOs). He acquired research and observational experience on the NEOs at professional observatories in Arizona, United States. Non-observational work focuses on computations of orbit and close approaches of asteroids with the Earth (linked at Near Earth Object Program at Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and orbit and identifications of asteroids and comets.

He wrote many articles on specialistic magazines. Member of SIMCA (Italian: Società Italiana Meccanica Celeste e Astrodinamica). His professional activity concerns the application of measuring systems encoders installed on telescopes and Radio telescopes such as the VLT, LBT, E-ELT (European-Extremely Large Telescope), ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), DAG (Turkish for Eastern Anatolia Observatory) and ASTRI (Astrophysics with mirrors at Italian Replicant Technology) or on space instruments as Solar Monitoring Observatory.

The Koronian asteroid 15460 Manca, discovered by Andrea Boattini and Luciano Tesi at San Marcello Pistoiese Observatory in 1998, is named in his honour.

List of discovered minor planets

Publications

• "Asteroid and Planet Close Encounters", Minor Planet Bulletin, ( 1999 F. Manca, P. Sicoli )
• "Monitoring Hazardous Objects", Proceedings of the Third Italian Meeting of Planetary Science, ( 2000 F. Manca, P. Sicoli )
• "Planetary Close Encounters", Proceedings of the Fourth Italian Meeting of Planetary Science, ( 2002 F. Manca, P. Sicoli )
• "Minor planet recovery: analysis and verification of data obtained by OrbFit and Edipo software", Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Meeting of Planetary Science, ( 2003 F. Manca, A. Testa, M. Carpino)
• "Identification of asteroids and comets: methods and results", Proceedings of the X National Conference on Planetary Science. (2011 F. Manca, P. Sicoli, and A. Testa)
• "Identification of asteroids and comets: update on methods and results". Proceedings of the XI National Conference on Planetary Science. (2013 F. Manca, A. Testa)
• "Close encounters among asteroids, comets, Earth-Moon system and inner planets: the cases of (99942) Apophis and Comet C/2013 A1 ". Proceedings of the XII Italian national workshop of planetary sciences. (2015 F. Manca, P. Sicoli, A. Testa)

MPECs, CBETs and IAUCs