The Arizona Daily Star
Wed Oct 27, 1999
Oh, gods
Asteroids now recall music deities
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Jerry Garcia, Eric Clapton and the Beatles are more just rock stars; they are stars with rocks. Asteroids are named for them.
The first heavenly bodies were given divine names like Mars, the god of war; or Venus, the goddess of love. But in 150 years of asteroid hunting, astronomers turned up 11,779 rocks. They ran out of deities.
So now asteroids pay homage to the more human gods of rock n' roll, including Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana and one each for the Fab Four. Those rock 'n' roll asteroids travel in the same lumi- iqellar orbits as, asteroids, Shakespeare,, Beethoven, Michelangel, DiMaggio, James Bond (rock number 9-007) and Attila (the Hun).
But. You don't have to be famous to be a piece of the rock. Asteroids Cindijon and Nancy are named for relatives. of astronomers.
Next month, a committee of astronomers is expected to add Audrey (as in Hepburn) and Gershwin (as in George) to star rocks. They are agonizing over one proposed name: Intel (as in the computer chip). Although there's already a Swissair asteroid, some scientists are reluctant to commercialize space once reserved for gods.
There are a few rules in choosing names, explained Brian Marsden, director of the Harvard University Minor Planet Center,
secretary of the International Astronomical Union's Small Bodies Names Committee - and an asteroid (named Marsden) himself.
Discoverers get first dibs on naming but can't name asteroids for themselves. Family members and colleagues are OK, pets are not. Politicians and military leaders must be dead at least 100 years before they can be honored. Eleven international astronomers have the final say.
Each month astronomers turn up 300 or so new chunks of debris orbiting the sun, Marsden said. They come up with about 100 names every two months, and are already 5,000 names behind.
Given that backlog, astronomers have become a lot looser and hipper when naming rocks. Rock number 9000, for example, they named HAL, for the wayward computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey."
You might get a rock named for you or a loved one by bugging an astronomer who has more rocks than names. That worked for Zappa fans who besieged Marsden with hundreds of e-mail
Grateful Dead fan Simon Radford, an Arizona radio astronomer, knew a fellow University of Arizona rock finder who had "a few spares. " He put the pitch in for the dead Grateful Dead rocker, and asteroid Garcia was born.
So now Radford has a unique Grateful Dead T-shirt. It's a fuzzy photo of Garcia the asteroid now a star among rocks.