Asteroid (13693) Bondar

Roberta Lynn Bondar (1945- ), selected as a Canadian astronaut in 1983, flew on space shuttle mission STS-42 and has inspired the interest of young Canadians in science.
Name proposed and citation prepared by Peter Jedicke and Robert Jedicke.

 
Orbit type: Main Belt Asteroid 

Reference: MPC 49098

Continue Reading

Asteroid (13405) Dorisbillings

Named in honour of Doris Billings, née Dora Kawchuk (b. 1925-), mother of the discoverer. Some of his earliest memories are of her fascination with space.

 

Orbit type: Main Belt Asteroid

Reference: MPC 42362

Continue Reading

Asteroid (12566) Derichardson

Named in honour of Derek Charles Richardson (b. 1968-02-01 in Vancouver, British Columbia), an expert on computational techniques who has made major contributions to the study of rubble piles, particularly their tidal distortion and their collisions. Richardson uses the n-body problem to investigate how asteroids interact, and how comets, planetary rings and planets form. The focus of his work involves combining gravity and collisional dynamics. Richardson did his undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia and received a Ph.D.

Continue Reading

Asteroid (12513) Niven

Named in honour of Ivan M. Niven (b. 1915, d. 1999), a Canadian-U.S. mathematician who worked mainly in number theory. In 1943 he completed the proof of Waring's conjecture, a conjecture formulated in 1770 to the effect that every positive integer is the sum of a finite number of n-th powers of integers.

Orbit type: Main Belt Asteroid

Reference: MPC 38202

Continue Reading

Asteroid (12423) Slotin

Named in honour of Louis Alexander Slotin (b. 1910-12-10 in Winnipeg, Canada, d. 1946-05-30 in Los Alamos, New Mexico), the first undergraduate student at the University of Manitoba to score perfect marks in chemistry and physics. Slotin earned his Ph.D. from King's College in London, United Kingdom, where his work in radiology helped establish radiation therapy as part of the arsenal of modern medicine. In the late 1930s, Slotin continued his work on the physics of the atomic nucleus with Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago.

Continue Reading

Asteroid (12317) Madicampbell

Named in honour of Margaret Diane Campbell (b. 1976-03-07 in Montréal, Canada), whose interest in astronomy began when she was a young girl. Campbell did undergraduate studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada, and completed her Ph.D. in 2002 at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, under Jim Jones. Campbell's research interests include video meteor observations as well as multi-frequency radar observations of meteor trails.

Continue Reading

Asteroid (12272) Geddylee

Geddy Lee (Gary Lee Weinrib, b. 1953) is the bassist, vocalist and keyboardist for the Canadian music band Rush. Geddy is the son of Polish concentration-camp survivors. He has become one of the most influential bass guitarists in rock music, and his voice is one of the most distinctive attributes of the band.

 

Orbit type: Main Belt Asteroid

Ref: MPC 60298

Continue Reading

Asteroid (12225) Yanfernández

Yanga (Yan) Roland Fernández (b. 1971-06-10 in Mississauga, Ontario) grew up in New York City, Minneapolis, Washington, D.C., and went to high school in Ft. Myers, Florida. After undergraduate studies at Caltech, Yan received his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 1999. As a student in 1994, he helped maintain one of the first email lists used by astronomers to communicate news about a fast-breaking event, the impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter.

Continue Reading

Asteroid (11955) Russrobb

Named in honour of Russell M. Robb (b. 1952-), astronomer at the University of Victoria, who played the leading role in automating the university's 0.5-m telescope and equipping it with a CCD camera. The telescope has been used extensively in the university's observational programs, including astrometric work on comets and minor planets.

 

Orbit type: Main Belt Asteroid

Reference: MPC 38201

Continue Reading

Asteroid (10870) Gwendolen

Named in honour of Mary Gwendolen Ellery Read Aikman (b. 1903, d. 1994), an inspiring educator and mother of the discoverer.

 

Orbit type: Main Belt Asteroid

Reference: MPC 41938

Continue Reading

Pages

Subscribe to RASC RSS