Senior Scientist Tim Lister PhD Has Minor Planet Named After Him

At the 14th Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conferenceon June 18-23 held in Flagstaff, Arizona, astrophysics scientist Tim Lister PhD, who works at the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) in Goleta, was awarded for his life’s work in the field with the naming of an asteroid, also known as a minor planet, after him. The meeting, of which NASA is one of the sponsors, was attended by Lister and his peers, like Peter Jenniskens PhD (Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and the NASA Ames Research Center), William F. Bottke PhD (Southwest Research Institute Boulder), and Richard Binzel PhD (MIT).

Not one for making a fuss of his credentials, Lister casually mentioned the award when he returned to LCO. Development Director Dr. Sandy Seale properly decided this is newsworthy, emailed me, and we set up an interview with photo-op at his office.

I arrived at LCO to find Lister his usual cool and casual self, at his desk quietly working on his projects. Last we talked was January this year about Comet C2023 E3 (ZTF), and his tips for tracking and viewing the phenomenon (see MJ Feb 2-9, 2023).

I congratulated him and asked him to pull up a view of his planet on his computer monitors. He blushed a thanks, and found it here for our readers:

(33933) Timlister = 2000 LE29
Discovery of the asteroid: 2000-06-09 / LONEOS / Anderson Mesa / 699

A little more about Lister: Tim Lister (b. 1975) is a British senior scientist at the LCO that has discovered dozens of asteroids and performed follow-up observations for hundreds more. He is a member of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) Investigation Team, making observations of the light curve and tail evolution of the Didymos system. 

Next, we dove in for the full story of this epic event in our solar system, how planets are named, his current and upcoming projects, and the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs! 

Q.How did the award come about?

A. This happened June 18-23 at the world-wide meeting of planetary scientists who study comets, asteroids, and meteorites titled, The 14th Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference. Approximately 550 scientists attended this year. 

The meeting is every three years. One of the meeting’s traditions is at the conference banquet, they honor people with their name on an asteroid. Usually, it is about 20 scientists getting named. This year, to make up for the missed meeting due to the pandemic, there were 96 named. 

What is the selection criteria for naming a planet after a scientist?

Basically, it is recognition by one’s peers who work in the field. My name, along with a lot of people who worked on the NASA DART, were put forward to the minor planet naming database, and we all were honored. 

There are 1.3 million asteroids discovered to date, 24,000 are named, and only a few thousand are named after “alive” people.

Did you know prior of the honor?

No, in this case no one knows, not even who you work for and with. When my name was announced, I was very shocked and honored. It is very nice to be recognized as someone who deserves an asteroid name. It was very cool. 

Is that minor planet named after you forever?

[Laughs] Yes, forever, as long as my asteroid is not smashed by another in the asteroid belt, and we are still tracking it!

How did they select which asteroid to name after you?

Because the meeting was in Flagstaff in conjunction with the Lowell Observatory, all the asteroids that were numbered and discovered by the Lowell Observatory at Anderson Mesa Station were chosen for the awards. 

My asteroid, discovered in June 2000, is a main belt asteroid. It is part of the main section of asteroids that orbit between Mars and Jupiter, which go around the sun every three and a quarter years. It is a mere 341 million kilometers (195 million miles) from Earth, and 329 million miles from the Sun. Its lifespan will last hundreds of millions of years unless something knocks it out of that orbit into a Near Earth Object path. 

What is next for you post the success of the DART Mission?

The DART mission is funded till the end of September. The ground-based observatories including the LCO have delivered all the data to the project, which is now being analyzed to figure out exactly what we did to the asteroid, and put into archives for future reference. 

(DART successfully deflected Dimorphos. Ref: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroid-s-motion-in-space)

Part two is the European Space Agency’s Hera mission in 2024, which like DART, will probe into the same binary asteroid system to do a detailed post-impact survey for data and repeatable planetary defense technique. DART and Hera are two parts of the same study of asteroid deflection and defense.

Will you be selected to be on the team for Part 2 with the European Space Agency (ESA)?

It is still to be decided about having scientists from other countries be on the ESA team.

Your thoughts on DART?

DART has been a fabulous project, to be a part of the world’s first interplanetary defense. It was great that it was much more successful than we thought it would be, but it is one step in the process. Hera [Mission] will find out what exactly we did. We need to find more asteroids that may potentially hit the Earth and develop a capability to deflect one anytime we need to.

DART showed us that we could deflect an asteroid of a particular type and size. From there, it is a two-part strategy. One, we are going to continue finding ones that could hit us, so we know in advance. You can’t launch DART just before it hits, you need time for the deflection to take effect, 10 to 20 years ahead of impact. And two, a more complete idea of how we did the deflection. We need to test this on different sizes and makes of asteroids to build a confidence level that the deflection technique works. And we need to build these DARTs for use. More research requires the will of Congress and funding agencies to support.

Talk about defending the planet.

Under the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs are two groups. The IAWN (International Asteroid Warning Network), which surveys the skies and alerts of any threatening asteroids and informs the necessary governments. We’ve done exercises and checks on this to make sure it works. The other group SMPAG (Space Mission Planning Advisory Group), is comprised of all the space faring nations, e.g. NASA and ESA. If IAWN says an asteroid is approaching Earth, SMPAG meets to figure out what to do. Defending the planet is an international problem, not a single government. All the space-faring nations are represented on the same page. This is funded by the U.N. members’ dues.

Your other top projects?

I also co-lead a multi-year LCO Key project with a global team, which uses LCO’s telescopes to study how new comets, that are coming into our solar system for the first time, “switch on” and start becoming active and how they get brighter and evolve through time as they get closer to the Sun. This is in support for another ESA mission, “Comet Interceptor,” which will launch a spacecraft in 2029 to flyby one of these new comets for the first time. We recently got additional telescope time for another 18 months to study more of these comets, particularly once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile comes online.

LCO and I are quite heavily focused on the avalanche of data that will be coming out of the Rubin Observatory, and how to send out the estimated hundreds of thousands of alerts from Rubin to the LCO community. Rubin is probably going to find another 10 million asteroids that will need to be cataloged. It will do operations and testing in 2024 and start its 10-year sky survey in 2026. At LCO we are developing the software programs and working with observatories to make them more robotic to quickly respond and point as many telescopes globally as possible to an event. 

We want the Rubin to be a success and discover lots of things, because only by discovering lots of asteroids are we going to be able to do the classifications and put the data into categories to help us figure out how the whole solar system got formed, what’s going to happen to it in the future, and what other solar systems are going to look like.  

The MJ thanks and congratulates Dr. Lister for his work in defending our planet, and wishes continued success to the LCO team!

411: Lister: https://lco.global/user/tlister/

Lister minor planet data: https://minorplanetcenter.net/db_search/show_object?utf8=%E2%9C%93&object_id=33933