The crew of Space Shuttle Columbia Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown, Laurel Clark and Israeli Ilan Ramon, payload specialist, now have celestial memorials, easily spotted from Earth.
The asteroid names, proposed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, were approved by the International Astronomical Union and released by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Minor Planet Center, the official clearinghouse of asteroid data.
The newly named asteroids were discovered at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego on the nights of 19-21 July 2001, by former JPL astronomer Eleanor F. Helin. He retired in July 2002. The seven asteroids range in diameter from five to seven kilometers (3.1 to 4.3 miles). The Palomar Observatory is owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
"Asteroids have been around for billions of years and will remain for billions more," said Dr. Raymond Bambery, Principal Investigator of JPL's Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking Project. "I like to think that in the years, decades and millennia ahead people will look to the heavens, locate these seven celestial sentinels and remember the sacrifice made by the Columbia astronauts," he said.
The final flight of Columbia (STS-107) was a 16-day mission devoted to research in physical, life and space sciences. The seven astronauts aboard the Columbia space shuttle Columbia worked 24 hours a day, in two alternating shifts, to complete approximately 80 separate experiments. On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia and its crew were lost over the western United States as the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere of the Earth.
Asteroids are rocky fragments left by the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years. Most of the known asteroids orbit the sun in a belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists believe that there are probably millions of asteroids, ranging from less than one kilometer (.62 miles) wide by hundreds of miles.
More than 100,000 asteroids have been detected since the first round was discovered on January 1, 1801. Ceres, the first asteroid ever discovered, is also the largest, about 933 kilometers (580 miles) in diameter.
The Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.