Utrecht University: Asteroid named after planetary scientist Inge Loes ten Kate

Asteroid (563318) = 2016 CD144 is henceforth known as (563318) ten Kate external link, after planetary scientist and astrobiologist Inge Loes ten Kate external link(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 Krisztián Sárneczky and Marco Langbroek with the 60-cm Schmidt telescope of the Piszkéstető 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.