"We are excited to have discovered the minor planet that will be visited by the OSIRIS-REx mission and to be able to engage students around the world to suggest a name for 1999 RQ36," said Grant Stokes, head of the Aerospace Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and principal investigator for the LINEAR program. The asteroid has an average diameter of approximately one-third of a mile (500 meters). LINEAR is part of NASA's Near Earth Observation Program in Washington, which detects and catalogs near-Earth asteroids and comets. The asteroid was discovered in 1999 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at Lincoln Laboratory. "We look forward to having a name that is easier to say than (101955) 1999 RQ36." "Our mission will be focused on this asteroid for more than a decade," said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for the mission at the University of Arizona. First prize will be awarded to the student who recommends a name that is approved by the International Astronomical Union Committee for Small-Body Nomenclature. 2.Ī panel will review proposed asteroid names. Submissions must be made by an adult on behalf of the student. Entries must include a short explanation and rationale for the name. Each contestant can submit one name, up to 16 characters long. The competition is open to students under age 18 from anywhere in the world. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. The contest is a partnership with The Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif. "Because the samples returned by the mission will be available for study for future generations, it is possible the person who names the asteroid will grow up to study the regolith we return to Earth," said Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. A closer scientific study of asteroids will provide context and help inform this mission. NASA also is planning a crewed mission to an asteroid by 2025. Samples returned from the primitive surface of the near-Earth asteroid currently called (101955) 1999 RQ36 could hold clues to the origin of the solar system and organic molecules that may have seeded life on Earth. Scheduled to launch in 2016, the mission is called the Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer ( OSIRIS-REx). Students worldwide have an opportunity to name an asteroid from which an upcoming NASA mission will return the first samples to Earth.
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