14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the American space agency announce that they want students to come up with names for a space rock that will be targeted by a 2016 NASA mission. Currently, the asteroid is called (101955) 1999 RQ36, which means that it's rather difficult to mention it in a fluent sentence.
In a little over three years, the NASA Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will launch towards the asteroid, and NASA wants the public to contribute to naming it properly.
“Because the samples returned by the mission will be available for study for future generations, it is possible the person who names the asteroid will grow up to study the regolith we return to Earth,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center OSIRIS-RExproject scientist Jason Dworkin says. NASA says that all students under the age of 18 can participate in the contest. Each name submission must have under 16 characters, and must be accompanied by a few sentences explaining the proposal.