Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Rock musician Frank Zappa now has a rocky namesake in space. The International
Astronomical Union has decided that Asteroid 3834 will henceforth be known
as ‘Zappafrank’.

The decision to honour Zappa was made after his death last year. ‘Frank
Zappa had a lot of followers and they all got together and wrote me letters
– I must have had about two hundred,’ says Brian Marsden, director of the
IAU’s Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Zappa’s name was
reversed to avoid confusion with another asteroid called Frank.

Zappa was a symbol of freedom and democracy in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia,
and so Marsden deemed Asteroid 3834, which was discovered at the country’s
Klet Observatory, most appropriate. Although discovered in 1980, the asteroid
had never been named. ‘The original discoverer left Klet many years ago,’
says Marsden. ‘But I checked with the current director of the observatory
and she thought it was a great idea.’

Zappafrank is not the first asteroid to be named after a rock musician.
Asteroids Lennon, McCartney, Starr and Harrison already exist – and there
are others named after Mike Oldfield (‘Oldfield’), Eric Clapton (‘Clapton’)
and Jean-Michel Jarre (‘Jarre’), an honour he shares with his father, composer
Maurice Jarre.

Another proposed name, ‘Wewilroku’ (after the song by the band Queen,
one of whose members – Brian May – studied astronomy at the University of
London), was rejected by a 4 to 3 vote. ‘I thought this was really rather
nice,’ says Marsden. ‘But some of the stodgier members of the committee
turned it down.’