Asteroids are fragments of rock left over from the process of creating the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago
Seven asteroids orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, will be named after the astronauts who perished in the space shuttle Columbia disaster. This is what senior officials in the International Astronomical Union said on Wednesday, 6/8/2003.
Astronauts Rick Husband, William McCall, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David Brown and Laurel Clark of NASA and Ilan Ramon of Israel perished in the disaster on February 1, 2003.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California proposed naming asteroids after the astronauts. The program was approved by the International Astronomical Union and announced on Wednesday by the Minor Planet Center of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
The asteroids in question were discovered by a former JPL astronomer, Eleanor Helin in 2001. Helin used the Palomar Observatory in San Diego. The size of these objects is between 5 and 7 kilometers in their widest area.
"The asteroids have been there for billions of years and will be there for billions more years," said Raymond Bambery, project manager for tracking near-Earth objects at JPL. "I would like to think that in the years, decades and centuries to come, people will look to the sky, locate these seven rocks and remember the sacrifice made by the Columbia astronauts.
There are over ten thousand known asteroids, most of which orbit the Sun in a belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The largest, Keres, has a diameter of 930 km. Astronomers believe that there are millions of asteroids, which are a kilometer to many kilometers in diameter.
A research fund for the USA and Israel named after the seven astronauts who perished in the Columbia crash
31.7.2003
Ilan Ramon in Colombia. The proposal will be submitted to Bush for approval
The United States and Israel will establish a joint research fund for research in the field of space and education in the name of the seven astronauts who perished in the space shuttle Columbia. The Minister of Science and Technology, Eliezer (Mudi) Zandberg, and President George W. Bush's scientific advisor, John Herman Marburger, agreed on the establishment of the fund during their meeting today, and the proposal will be submitted for Bush's approval in the next two weeks. All seven astronauts on the shuttle, including the Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, were killed when the ferry broke up over Texas on February 1 of this year.
Marburger, who is responsible for establishing the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), further told Zandberg that he is interested in expanding cooperation with Israel in the field of technological education after he expressed concern about the decline in exact science studies among American teenagers and students. In addition, the two decided to expand cooperation between Israeli researchers and American researchers in the field of nanotechnology.
