2980 Cameron, provisionally designated , is a

main-belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids ...

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

discovered by prolific American astronomer

Schelte Bus Schelte John "Bobby" Bus (born 1956) is an American astronomer and discoverer of minor planets at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaiʻi and deputy director of NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) at the Mauna Kea Obser ...

Siding Spring Observatory Siding Spring Observatory near Coonabarabran, New South Wales, Australia, part of the Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics (RSAA) at the Australian National University (ANU), incorporates the Anglo-Australian Telescope along with a coll ...

, Australia, on March 2, 1981. It orbits the Sun every 4.11 years at a distance of 2.1–3.0 AU. The asteroid was named after astrophysicist and cosmogonist

Alastair G. W. Cameron Alastair G. W. (Graham Walter) Cameron (21 June 1925 – 3 October 2005) was an American–Canadian astrophysicist and space scientist who was an eminent staff member of the Astronomy department of Harvard University. He was one of the founde ...

(1925–2005), who was associate director for theoretical astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He was an early advocate of the concepts of a turbulent accretion disk solar nebula, and of the origin of the Moon by a giant impact on the

proto-Earth Early Earth also known as Proto-Earth is loosely defined as Earth in its first one billion years, or gigayear (Ga, 109 y), from its initial formation in the young Solar System at about 4.55 Ga to some time in the Archean eon in approximately 3.5 Ga ...

. He also studied the nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, and the cosmic abundances of nuclides.

References

External links

Dictionary of Minor Planet Names
Google books * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cameron 002980 Discoveries by Schelte J. Bus Named minor planets 19810302