A Match Made in the Heavens

As Rotary International’s float rolls along the Rose Parade route Monday, a Martian and an astronaut will be playing Frisbee with a Martian dog and an Earth dog. And an arrow will be pointing toward space and the Paulharris asteroid.

Our story begins on Sept. 8, 1988, when planetary scientist Eleanor Helin, peering through a telescope at Palomar Observatory northeast of San Diego, discovered a potato-shaped asteroid about 10 miles in diameter.

Protocol--and sound science--dictate that a newly identified asteroid be observed three times in its orbit around the sun and then, Helin said, “It’s up to the discoverer to give it a name.”

Having been duly “recovered,” or verified, by astronomers worldwide, this asteroid was, in time, entered in the international log published in Russia as No. 5349, there having been 5,348 others entered since the first recorded asteroid sighting in Sicily 187 years earlier.

Then one recent day, Helin, who heads the Palomar Planet-Crossing Asteroid Survey and International Near-earth Asteroid Survey at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, happened to sit next to former Caltech alumni association president Theodore Combs at a banquet.

Combs, a Rotarian, was thinking about the globe-spanning theme for this year’s float, “Building Universal Friendship,” and about how Rotary has raised $240 million-plus with a goal of eradicating polio worldwide by 2000.

“Would it be appropriate,” he asked Helin, “to name an asteroid for the founder of Rotary International?”

It was serendipity. Said Helin: “He did not know that I had had polio.”

As a 5-year-old growing up in Pasadena, she contracted the disease and was bedridden for a year. “It was a struggle,” she said, and her father was tireless in helping her overcome the paralysis.

He happened also to have been a Rotarian. All in all, Helin said, “I felt this is most fitting.”

For 25 years, Helin has devoted her life to sighting and tracking asteroids, which are minor planets, fragmented rocky bodies left over from the creation of the solar system. Unlike comets, which are sort of rocky snowballs, asteroids are iceless.

Most are so-called main-belt asteroids, moving in nearly circular orbits between those of Mars and Jupiter. But there are also asteroids whose orbits bring them close to Earth. It is these--about 340 are known--that most intrigue Helin. She describes Paulharris as an inner-belt asteroid, one of those thought of as “precursors to the near-Earth asteroids.” With a little bump from another body, they could be flung into near-Earth space.

Paulharris “kisses the orbit of Mars, which is significant.” It would “certainly be a flyby,” and maybe a stop, for travelers to Mars.

Since 1973, Helin and her team have discovered 90 near-Earth asteroids, about 30% to 35% of all identified over that time. She has been credited with more discoveries than any scientist in the world.

The discoverer may name an asteroid for a friend, a scientist, a place.

Helin named one Druyan (for astronomer Carl Sagan’s wife, Ann). Sagan already had his. Now, Helin explains, they can be “in eternal space together.” She named one Pauling (for the late chemist Linus). She plans to name one Occidental, for her alma mater, Occidental College.

An asteroid she discovered in September, 1978, just after the Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, is called Ra-Shalom--that’s Ra, for the Egyptian sun god, and Shalom, the Hebrew word for peace.

Other namers have gone commercial (which is frowned upon) or quirky. There’s Swissair. And there’s Roddenberry, for “Star Trek” creator Gene. Because the naming committee of the International Astronomical Union likes to keep things simple, it prefers single names--thus, Paulharris.

“ ‘Harris’ was taken,” Helin explained, “and ‘Paul’ is not distinctive enough.”

There was nothing controversial about an extraterrestrial accolade for this Chicago attorney who founded Rotary in 1905. The names the committee has resisted have been those carrying political baggage. A ruler of an “unfriendly” nation, for example.

Helin estimates that two-thirds of the 6,000 known asteroids are now named. At first, she said, they really went through the Greek and Roman mythology. “Now all of the important Greek gods and goddesses have been used. One may find a son of Apollo or a grandniece of Hermes.”

Fittingly, a colleague named an asteroid for her. That’s asteroid Glo, the nickname by which friends, family and fellow workers know Helin.

Each new discovery keeps her recharged.

She said that some of them have come very close to Earth, and there’s always a chance of “finding an object really on a collision course” with us.

She and other scientists are also identifying asteroids that “might be good candidates for a (manned space) mission.” In 1997-98, she mentioned, the Japanese are going to collect samples on Nereus, “one of my asteroids.”

She is among the scientists who believe that it was a large asteroid, perhaps six miles in diameter, that did in the dinosaurs when it struck the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, plunging Earth into cold and darkness.

“There are hundreds of thousands of objects” of significant size out there, said Helin, who’s spent many long nights at telescopes from Mauna Kea to Scandinavia.

Should an asteroid the size of a football field hit a city (an unlikely scenario), “it would be disastrous,” Helin said. The explosive impact would set off “massive shock waves,” earthquakes and tidal waves, and obscure the sky for weeks.

Helin is not speculating on the odds of that but, she said, she would gamble that within the next 100 years an asteroid more than 100 feet in diameter will plunge to Earth somewhere with “stunning and alarming impact for people. It’s something that would certainly get our attention.”

What are earthlings to do?

There has been talk of intercepting a plummeting asteroid with a nuclear space probe and nudging it into a different orbit. But, Helin said, “It’s years before we’ll really be able to alter an orbit” effectively.

Meanwhile, on Monday, parade-watchers will see that sign pointing to asteroid Paulharris some whimsical number of millions of miles away.

And the real Paulharris? It has an orbital period around the sun of about 4.5 years and will next be seen clearly over Southern California in August, 1997.

*

If, as has been said, Angelenos are what they drive, these recent license-plate sightings do give one pause: JACKRIPR and CHNSAW 1. Other favorites from our personalized-plates file: on a gold Lexus, GATS B. On a white Mercedes, A2 BRTUS.

And, finally, one perhaps to be avoided during rush hour: a white Mitsubishi identifying its driver as MS MAGOO.