What
did you get for Xmas? Mark Thiemens, dean of Physical Sciences,
got a planet. O.K., it’s a “minor-planet” but
the asteroid 7004 was named Markthiemens to honor a career studying
and analyzing meteorites. Brian Marsden, head of the minor planet
center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says
Thiemens’ asteroid was first spotted by Schelte J. Bus,
II, an associate astronomer at the University of Hawaii
at Manoa, who officially named it in honor of Thiemens. Markthiemens
is one of 134,000 asteroids that have
been discovered (and one of the 13,000 named). It orbits the inner
part of the main asteroid belt and is thought
to be about six miles in diameter.
The founder and director of UCSD’s Center for Environmental
Research and Training, Thiemens has done research on a wide variety
of problems—from ozone chemistry to global warming to questions
about the prospect of life on Mars. “As someone who has loved
space and space science since I was a kid and who has spent a research
career
involved with space and rockets,” says Thiemens, “this
is a wonderful acknowledgement.”
Contributors to Making Waves: Mario Aguilera, '89, Marnette Federis, '06, Beverly Gallagher, '98, Raymond Hardie and Inga Kiderra.
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