What asteroid is named after a physicist who is a founding member of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics?
57868 Pupin 57868 Pupin, provisional designation 2001 YD, is a dark Erigonian asteroid and slow rotator from the inner regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 3.5 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 17 December 2001, by astronomers of Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT) at the Palomar Observatory in California, United States. The asteroid was name after Serbian–American physicist Mihajlo Pupin.
Frank Asaro Frank Asaro (born Francesco Asaro, July 31, 1927 – June 10, 2014) was an Emeritus Senior Scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory associated with the University of California at Berkeley. He is best known as the chemist who discovered the iridium anomaly in the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary layer that led the team of Luis Alvarez, Walter Alvarez, Frank Asaro, and Helen Michel to propose the Asteroid-Impact Theory, which postulates that an asteroid hit the Earth sixty-five million years ago and caused mass extinction during the age of the dinosaurs.