(7279) Hagfors Main-belt Asteroid
Discovered on 7 November 1985 by E. Bowell at Anderson Mesa.
Named in honor of Tor Hagfors (b. 1930), in celebration of his 68th birthday and his retirement as director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie. In the 1960s, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory, Hagfors conducted extensive radar investigations of the moon. The radar backscattering function now called the Hagfors Law, which he derived to support his analysis of lunar echoes, remains the most widely applied model for interpreting quasispecular echoes from the moon, Mercury, Mars and Venus. Hagfors served as director of operations of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center's Arecibo Observatory from 1971 to 1973 and as director of NAIC during the time, 1982-1992, when Arecibo conducted 68 successful radar experiments on minor planets.Naming citation (19990402/MPCPages.arc), IAU / Minor Planet Center, via NASA/JPL
Where Hagfors is today
Seen from above the solar system on 2026-10-14: Hagfors is 3.66 au from the Sun and 4.65 au from Earth. Computed from JPL's orbital elements.
Facts
| Number | 7279 |
| Provisional designation | 1985 VD1 |
| Orbit class | Main-belt Asteroid |
| Diameter | 13.1 km (#3,695 largest of 17,440 named asteroids with a measured size) |
| Albedo | 0.0710 |
| Absolute magnitude (H) | 13.21 |
| Orbital period | 5.46 years |
| Semi-major axis | 3.10 au |
| Perihelion – aphelion | 2.54 – 3.66 au |
| Eccentricity | 0.181 |
| Inclination | 5.34° |
| Closest distance between its orbit and Earth's (MOID) | 1.54 au |
Data: NASA/JPL Small-Body Database and the IAU Minor Planet Center.