As minor planet discoveries are confirmed, they are given a permanent number by the IAU's Minor Planet Center (MPC), and the discoverers can then submit names for them, following the IAU's naming conventions. The list below concerns those minor planets in the specified number-range that have received names, and explains the meanings of those names.
Based on Paul Herget's The Names of the Minor Planets,[6] Schmadel also researched the unclear origin of numerous asteroids, most of which had been named prior to World War II. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: SBDB New namings may only be added to this list below after official publication as the preannouncement of names is condemned.[7] The WGSBN publishes a comprehensive guideline for the naming rules of non-cometary small Solar System bodies.[8]
Ella Marie (Ellarie) Chase Rosales (born 1966) of Jalisco, Mexico, is a close family friend of astronomer Daniel W. E. Green, who made the identifications for this minor planet
Viktor Mikhailovich Chernov (1902–1984), a Ukrainian astronomer who obtained valuable new results on variable stars, on the dependence of brightness and color of lunar eclipses on solar activity, as well as on transient lunar phenomena
Actress Tat'yana Vasil'evna Doronina (born 1933) created splendid roles for both stage and screen. She worked in the largest Leningrad and Moscow theaters and since 1992 has been leader of the Moscow Art Academic Gorky Theatre. She was awarded People's artist of Russia (1969) and of the U.S.S.R. (1975).
French-Mauritian novelist of more than 30 novels, J. M. G. Le Clézio (born 1940) is particularly well known for his Voyage to Rodrigues. He was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature based on his "authorship of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy"
Takashi Onaka (born 1952) is a professor of infrared astronomy at the University of Tokyo. He is known for his comprehensive study of the interplanetary, circumstellar and interstellar dust based on ground-based/space-borne observations, theoretical approaches and laboratory experiments.
Copiapó, a mining district in northern Chile, was in 2010 the scene of a severe mining accident, with 33 miners buried alive at a depth of almost 700 meters for more than two months. They were finally rescued alive and healthy
Joseph Heco (Hikozo Hamada, 1837–1897) was born in Harima town, Hyogo prefecture. He survived a shipwreck in 1851, was taken to the US and became one of the first Japanese to become a US citizen. Returning to Japan, he published the first Japanese newspaper, while Japan was still closed to the outside world
Tae Nakano (born 1975) plays an active part as a planetarian in the Kita-Kyushu Children's Culture and Science Museum and a researcher in the Kyushu Institute of Technology. She also undertakes outreach activities with nano-satellites.
Chika Yoshitomi (born 1981) plays an active part as an astronomy communicator in Kyushu, Japan. She has worked at Hoshi no Bunka Kan, Tachibana Observatory and Kasuga-ciry Hoshi no Yakata, and has brought up many "little" astronomers.
The Japanese town of Sakawa in the Kochi prefecture with a population of 20,000, known for brewing a famous brand of sake. It has produced many noted politicians, scientists, and musicians, including Masamitsu Yamasaki, who discovered comet 27P/Crommelin independently in 1928.
Kiyoshi Nariyuki (born 1960) has played an active part in astronomical clubs in his area, often becoming their leader in his pursuit of amateur astronomy over the past 30 years. A 0.25-m telescope is installed in the private observatory he completed in 2005.
Eckhart Pitz (born 1940), a German physicist at the Heidelberg Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie. He is a leading expert in astronomical instrumentation, from the extreme ultraviolet to the far infrared.
Ditte Besard (1977–2010), eldest daughter of Camilla and artist Hugo Besard, died after a struggle over many years. Implicitly remembering the goddess Eunomia, her father expressed his feelings as follows: Hour after hour, day after day, time comes downwards like falling snow and covers the present with a carpet
Yuka Akasaki (born 1960) has been a coach at a swimming school in Nankoku city for more than 20 years and has coached many excellent swimmers. She herself competes in Japanese Masters' swimming competitions.
Yoshihiro Higa (1965–2015) was an amateur astronomer and science communicator. He created the first astronomical science cafe in Sendai, Japan. He was also an amateur meteor researcher.
Victoria Pavin Hibbs (born 1954) has been known to the discoverer since her birth. She is now a learning specialist for children in science and mathematics and a water color installation artist.
Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678) was the first female student at the University of Utrecht, although she was obliged to follow the courses from behind a curtain. Excelling in many disciplines, she was one of the most intellectual women in Europe. A true polyglot, she corresponded actively with scholars around the world
François Poullain de la Barre (1647–1725) was a French priest, writer, and Cartesian and feminist philosopher. In 1673 he published a radical and philosophically sophisticated defense of the equality of women and men.
This name is a combination of the names of the first discoverer's parents, Shoji (b. 1929) and Tomoko (1931–2011) Hirasawa. Shoji made his son's first telescope.
Luca Rubini (1980–2014) was an entrepreneur, astronomy enthusiast, science communicator and expert astrophotographer. The high-quality deep-sky images he produced have been published in specialized journals.
Jeff Schroeder (born 1954) has contributed to the mechanical design and fabrication of all the NEAT cameras, starting with the 1995 NEAT/GEODSS camera, continuing with the 2000 NEAT/MSSS camera and concluding with the 2001 NEAT/Oschin camera. He has worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at JPL for 22 years.
Hidekazu Hanayama (born 1977) is an astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. He works on observational studies of transient objects with the Murikabushi 1.05-m reflector at the Ishigakijima Astronomical Observatory and discovered a secondary nuclear condensation of comet 213P/Van Ness.
Kazunari Shibata (born 1954) is a professor at Kyoto University, and has served as director of Kwasan and Hida Observatories for 15 years. He has contributed to the understanding of the basic magnetohydrodynamic mechanism of jets and ares on the Sun, stars, accretion disks, and active galactic nuclei.
Tetsu Nakamura (1946–2019) was a Japanese medical doctor who worked for the Afghan people and who was gunned down on his way to his project site in Afghanistan. He started providing medical services for leprosy patients in 1984, and later for Afghan refugees in Peshawar, Pakistan.
Nisshinkan, a school for children of Aizu feudal lords during Japan's Edo period. It was notable for being one of the few schools of the time to have an observatory.
Stefano Vitale (born 1951) is a full professor of physics at University of Trento. He is the PI of the LISA Technology Package payload on board the LISA Pathfinder mission of the ESA, launched in 2015 as a precursor to a space-borne gravitational wave observatory.
The cueca, the complex national dance of Chile, dates to around 1824. Partners mimic movements of rooster and hen in courting, holding and waving a white handkerchief in the right hand, dancing to guitar music, voices, drums and clapping. The name was suggested by J. Montani
Arnaud Denjoy (1884–1974) was one of a group of French mathematicians (including Baire, Borel and Lebesgue) who in the early twentieth century initiated a new approach to the theory of functions of real variables, measure theory and integration.
Pierre Thierry (born 1950) has built equipment designed for making astronomical observations. He created the Association des Utilisateurs de Détecteurs Electroniques in 1994
Theatre Semafor was a special phenomenon of Prague cultural life in the 1960s, with leading personalities Jirí Suchý (born 1931) and Jirí Slitr (1924–1969). Many of their songs became popular and they can be still heard by campfires.
Su Ding-qiang (born 1936), an astronomer and optical engineering expert, made many creative contributions to Chinese astronomical instruments, including a new idea to apply active optics to obtain the shape of a changeable optical system that could not be realized in the conventional way
Steve LaBrecque (born 1964) was responsible for the successful installation and operations of the NEAT/MSSS camera in 2000. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory he has also worked on the Mars orbital camera. Earlier he developed and serviced shipboard oceanographic equipment at the Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory.
Axel Fredrik Cronstedt (1722–1765), a mining expert and director of mines in central Sweden, discovered the new element nickel in minerals he found in Hälsingland. Using phosphorus salts and the blowpipe technique he qualitatively analyzed colored metallic oxides
Grazia Deledda (1871–1936) was an Italian writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1926 for her idealistically-inspired writings which, with clarity, picture the life on Sardinia, her native island.
David Thompson (1770–1857), a British-Canadian furtrader and surveyor, mapped 3.9 million square kilometers of North America. Navigating the full length of the Columbia River in 1811, he produced a high-quality map of the river basin. He has been called the greatest land geographer who ever lived
Creedence Clearwater Revival, frequently referred to as CCR or simply "Creedence", was an American rock band that gained popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s
Emile Claus (1849–1924), was a Belgian Flemish painter, known for his landscapes, especially from and around the Lys river. Influenced by Claude Monet, he developed his own impressionism and is now considered the leader of the Belgian Luminism movement. Among his most famous paintings is De Ijsvogels (1891)
Arrested for refusing to be moved to Indian Territory, Standing Bear (1834–1908) petitioned the U.S. District Court in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1879 by writ of habeas corpus. The trial led to the decision that Native Americans are "persons within the meaning of the law" and have the rights of citizenship.
Stéphane Guisard (born 1970), an optician at the European Southern Observatory in Cerro Paranal, where he is working on the Very Large Telescope, including the very complex interferometer.
Pim (1995–2001), son of Nigel and Jantina Douglas, enjoyed a brief life and brought joy to his family. This minor planet was discovered on his third birthday.
Roberto Castillo (born 1961) works at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal site, where he takes care of several instruments. He also builds telescopes for amateurs, and it is said that half the amateur telescopes in Chile have been constructed by him.
Wen Ping Chen (born 1958) leads the National Central University of Taiwan's participation in the Taiwan-American Occultation Survey (TAOS), the goal of which is to map the distribution of small transneptunian objects
Alexandra K. Terentyeva (born 1933) has been a meteor astronomer for more than 50 years at the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. .
Rowan Sebastian Atkinson (born 1955), one of Britain's finest comedy actors of the last two decades, was inspired by the work of Jacques Tati and John Cleese. Whether the comedy is verbal, as in the television series Blackadder, or physical, as in Mr. Bean, Atkinson is always brilliant.
Herman Potočnik (1892–1929), a Slovene engineer and pioneer of cosmonautics, who was the first to describe a space station in a geostationary orbit and its applications under the pseudonym of Hermann Noordung in 1928 †
Lawrence Dunkelman (1917–2002), an American optical researcher and pioneer in the development of ultraviolet detectors at Naval Research Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center, which he applied to astronomical and geophysical problems †
Bill Nye (born 1955), an American science educator, television presenter, and mechanical engineer, best known for his TV program Bill Nye the Science Guy
Tokunai Mogami (1755–1836) explored the northern area of Japan and learned astronomy, surveying and navigation from Toshiaki Honda, a Dutch scholar. He was engaged in the investigation and development of Hokkaido, Kurile Islands and Sakhalin.
Basòdino is the second-highest mountain (3273 m) in the Swiss canton Ticino; its glacier is the most significant one in the canton, but it has retreated by about 1400m in the last 150 years.
Albert G. Jarvis (1911–1996) invented fasteners for industry and the machines to produce them. In addition to being an inventor he was also a good friend and neighbor, always ready to help repair a neighbor's home or farm machinery, or help a teenager build a science project or rebuild his or her first automobile
Matthew Klimesh (born 1968) developed the efficient data compressor for archiving the voluminous NEAT data. He has been with the Communications Systems and Research Section at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory since 1996. His research interests include data compression, rate-distortion theory and channel coding.
Father Antonio Romañá, S.J. (Antonio Romañá Pujó; 1900–1981), a Spanish mathematician and astronomer of Catalan origin and director of the Ebro Observatory (Catalan: Observatori de l'Ebre) †‡
At absolute magnitude 11.7, this largest minor planet found by the discoverer, just 1.2 degrees west of Jupiter, is named in honor of his father, Chu Chiu Yeung (born 1925), for his unconditional support.
Amanda Jennifer Jane Robinson is a student of psychology at the University of Kansas and an empathetic caregiver to those in need of emotional support. She is the daughter of the discoverer.
Dongyan Liu (born 1987) of Suzhou, Jiangsu, a Chinese student majoring in English at Suzhou University, who served as interpreter for the International Workshop on Cometary Astronomy and a total solar eclipse expedition in China in July 2009
Leandro Lage dos Santos Guedes (born 1976), a Brazilian astronomer at the Rio de Janeiro planetarium, helped to organize the fifth International Workshop on Cometary Astronomy in 2009
Fernand Rigaux (1905–1962) was a Belgian astronomer at the Royal Observatory, Uccle, who discovered several asteroids (including the one that now bears his name).
The Dazaifu government office was in charge of the Kyushu area and the two islands of Iki and Tsushima in the second half of the 7th century. It was a base of defense and diplomatic relations at that time. The corner stones of the remains of the capital towers 'tofuro' remain in Dazaifu city.
Stavby is a small village outside Uppsala. Stavby's church was started in the mid–13th century and there are still extant frescoes from the 1490s on its walls and vault.
Aleksey Vasil'evich Pogorelov (1919–2002), a Ukrainian Soviet mathematician, was responsible for the solution of a number of key problems in geometry "as a whole", in the fundamentals of geometry, in the theory of the Monge-Ampère equation and in the geometrical theory of thin elastic shells
Alexey Alexandrovich Ashkinazi (born 1949) is deputy director for capital construction at CrAO. For 39 years he was engaged in the construction and repair of the Observatory's telescopes and residential buildings, as well as the construction of communication lines to the outside world
Shigeyoshi Nabeshima (1800–1862) was the 28th lord of Takeo area, Saga domain in the 19th century. He imported globes and astronomical telescopes, and introduced foreign studies including astronomy. He is respected as a local hero, called Shigeyoshi-kou in Takeo.
Vasily Vasil'evich Martynenko (1930–2000) was a researcher of meteor streams, an organizer of annual meteor expeditions and author of many papers and books. He organized an observatory for young amateurs in Simferopol, a studio of space paintings and a mineralogical museum
"Palazzo Lascaris" the historical home of Council of the Piedmont Region, which has promoted the culture of science, scientific knowledge, research and teaching, notably the development of initiatives with the Astrophysical Observatory of Turin.
Kiyokazu Inage (born 1950) is a Japanese amateur astronomer and popularizer of astronomy in Kagawa Prefecture. His main interests are nebulae, star clusters, solar eclipses and deep space observations, and he is well known for his beautiful stellar photographs.
Domenico Trezzini (c. 1670–1734), a Swiss architect and engineer, who worked in St. Petersburg, Russia, beginning in 1703 and is regarded as the city's first architect. He built the Peter and Paul fortress, the Summer Palace of Peter I and the House of 12 Boards, which now houses St. Petersburg University.
Juliette Binoche (born 1964) became world-famous for her performance in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), a movie based on Milan Kundera's novel (1984)
Varuna is one of the oldest of the vedic deities, the maker and upholder of heaven and earth. As such he is king of gods and men and the universe, and he has unlimited knowledge.