Asteroid named after ‘Hitchhiker’ humorist

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

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Through the years, about 12,000 asteroids have been given proper names by the IAU's Committee on Small Body Nomenclature — including fictional characters as well as mythological names (Ceres and Quaoar) and real-life personages (Lincoln and Elvis).

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One (MSNBC.com) reader, Sean Ferris, put Adams' name forward — and we took it a step further by seeing if there was an asteroid particularly fitting for the honor.

One prospect stood out: an asteroid given the provisional designation 2001 DA42, discovered by the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research project, or LINEAR. It's a relatively unremarkable space rock, orbiting 224 million miles (358 million kilometers) from the sun in the main asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter. But its name held triple significance.

Not only did it memorialize the year of Adams' death (2001) and his initials (DA), but it also referenced the number 42 — which is absurdly meaningful in the "Hitchhiker" saga as the "answer to the Ultimate Question." (The problem was, no one ever knew precisely what the Ultimate Question was.)

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