Name origin: Venetia Phair (née Burney), who at age 11 was the first to suggest the name Pluto when said planet was discovered. She studied mathematics and became an accountant, and later a teacher.
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Name origin: Jack B. Child (b. 1951), software engineer at JPL and Asteroid Project director of the World Space Foundation; honoured for his “generous helpfulness” and for introducing team members to the Palomar project.
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Named for the ancient Indian philosophical principle of cause and effect: good actions and intent have good consequences; bad actions and intent have bad consequences. This can also refer to how a person’s actions affect who they become. (Note that the various theories of karma are generally much more complex than in popular media descriptions.)
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Name origin: Important Egyptian underworld god, husband of Isis. Osiris was originally a local deity from Lower Egypt who may have been a personification of fertility in the chthonic realms. He evolved to represent both fertility and death/resurrection.
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Name origin: Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation. As one of the principal Olympian gods, there are multiple myths about her.
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Probably named for the Monterosa, a ship used by the University of Hamburg on their outings on the North Sea.
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Australian-British professor Gilbert Murray (1866-1957) helped Austria recover from World War I in 1920. He was an outstanding scholar of Ancient Greek literature, language and culture. Involved in the League of Nations from 1916, he was also president of the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK) in 1929 and 1930, and a founder of Oxfam.
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Named in honour of Ernst Heinrich Bruns (1848-1919), a German mathematician and astronomer, who also contributed to the development of the field of theoretical geodesy (measurement of the Earth’s relative geometry, gravity and orientation over time). He was mainly engaged in developing the theoretical side of Earth’s shape.
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Stateira was a queen of ancient Persia who died about 400 BCE; wife of Artaxerxes II. She had a son, who became Artaxerxes III. She was a popular ruler, apparently because she talked to ordinary people, but did not get on well with her mother-in-law Parysatis, who eventually poisoned her.
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Name origin: Simeïs Observatory and the town of Simeïs, Crimea, Ukraine, where the object was first discovered. A total of 150 minor planets were found at the observatory, which operated as a research site until the mid-1950s and is now used for studying satellite orbits.
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