Asteroid named after planetary scientist Inge Loes ten Kate
Asteroid (563318) = 2016 CD144 is henceforth known as , after planetary scientist and astrobiologist Inge Loes ten Kate (Faculty of Geosciences). The name is a just acknowledgement of the interdisciplinary nature of her scientific activities, which is also evident from her career: from aerospace engineering via astronomy to geosciences/planetary sciences.
Asteroid (563318) ten Kate was discovered exactly 7 years ago today by Kriszti谩n S谩rneczky and Marco Langbroek with the 60-cm Schmidt telescope of the Piszk茅stet艖 Observatory (MPC 461) on a mountaintop in the Matra mountains of Hungary. The asteroid is part of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, circles the sun in 4.6 years and is somewhere between 0.9 and 2.1 km in size.
The initiative for the name came from the discoverers. Their proposal was accepted by the Working Group on Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organisation that deals with the naming of astronomical objects, among other things.
On the NASA website you can look at the asteroid in relation to other planets in our solar system.
