How YOU can name an asteroid: Japan asks for help in creating moniker for space ... trends now
Japan's space agency, JAXA, wants your help naming a silicon-based asteroid giant that roughly the size of the Golden Gate Bridge.
The researchers are looking for any — 'non-offensive' — suggestions, 16-characters long or less, that are better than this S-type asteroid's current name: 2001 CC21.
The campaign, which ends May 9, comes ahead of JAXA's plans to fly their Hayabusa2 space probe passed this stony, approximately 1,300-to-1,800-foot long near-Earth asteroid in July 2026.
The winning name will join the likes of asteroid 162173 Ryugu, named after a magical underwater 'Dragon Palace' from Japanese folklore; 101955 Bennu, named after a bird from Egyptian mythology; and many more orbiting our solar system.
Japan's space agency, JAXA, wants your help naming a silicon-based asteroid giant very roughly the size of the Golden Gate Bridge. The campaign comes ahead of JAXA's plans to fly their Hayabusa2 space probe (depicted above) passed the stony, nearly 1,800-foot long object
JAXA researchers are looking for any - 'non-offensive' - suggestions, 16-characters long or less, and better than the S-type asteroid's current name: 2001 CC21. After May 9, the winning name will join Bennu, named after the Egyptian mythological bird, and many more in orbit
Asteroid 2001 CC21 orbits the sun once every 383.1 days or 1.05 years, just a little longer than Earth's own orbit around the Sun.
While the space rock's distance qualifies it as a 'near-Earth object,' by the standards of NASA's science definition team, the asteroid only ever gets as close as 0.08 astronomical units, or 7,436,465 miles, from Earth's orbit.
Those millions of miles are a healthy, safe distance for an asteroid like 2001 CC21, which is larger than 97-percent of known asteroids — but small compared to the the largest known giants in our solar system, like record-holder 'dwarf planet' 1 Ceres.
Ceres, which orbits the Sun between Mars and Jupiter and carries a payload of salty ice, clocks in at 600 miles-long and weighs an estimated 1035 tons (939,300 kg), making it over 1,700 times larger than 2001 CC21.
Japan's space agency, JAXA, has given the Hayabusa2 probe its own cartoon mascot, Haya2-kun (above) - whose motto is 'Do My Best!' The probe will image the asteroid 2001 CC21 in July 2026
First discovered on February 3, 2001 by the US Air Force's Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR)
