Saturday 29 January 2005

Asteroid Douglasadams (Formerly 2001 DA42)

Via A Voyage to Arcturus, an article from MSNBC :
Asteroid Douglasadams was among the 71 newly named celestial objects announced Tuesday by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass. Other honorees range from Ball Aerospace and the city of Las Vegas to the sometimes-overlooked co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, Rosalind Franklin.
It is
...an asteroid given the provisional designation 2001 DA42, discovered by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research project, or LINEAR. It's a relatively unremarkable space rock, orbiting 224 million miles (358 million kilometers) from the sun in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. But its name held triple significance.

Not only did it memorialize the year of Adams' death (2001) and his initials (DA), but it also referenced the number 42
As well as being mostly harmless.

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