Asteroid Name Generator

How the Asteroid / Comet Name Generator works

How the asteroid name generator works

An asteroid has a name for each stage of its life, and the generator gives four of them. The provisional designation is the one it gets on discovery, a year and two letters with an optional number in the manner of the real minor-planet designations, 2087 KL4, 2091 TB, 2102 AX17, 2113 QP3, set a few decades ahead so that a story set in the belt has rocks discovered in its own time. The numbered asteroid is the one it gets once its orbit is known, a number in brackets or bare and a name, which the real convention gives to the discoverer to choose, (4471) Marrow, 88213 Callixia, (903) Okonkwo, (19033) Vossia, 2201 Kepleria, (812) Seraphis, so the names are the surnames and worlds of the shared setting of this section, with the feminine Latin ending the real convention likes, Callixia, Vossia, Petrova, Kepleria, Cassiana. The comet name is the discoverer's, since comets keep the name of whoever saw them first, Comet Halloran, Comet Okonkwo-Vasq, Comet Mbeki-Thorne, or the full designation with the discoverer in brackets, C/2091 T3 (Halloran) for a long-period comet, P/2077 Q1 (Reyes) for a periodic one, or the numbered periodic form, 212P/Mbeki, 47P/Tanaka. The belter's name is the miner's, which ignores all of the above, an adjective and a rock word, the Grey Drift, the Long Ice, the Iron Anvil, the Hollow Rock, the Rich Claim, the Cold Slab, the Tumbling Potato, the Twin Boulder, or a surname and one, Kepler's Stone, Vasq's Claim, Okonkwo's Reef, Marrow's Nugget, or a figure and one, the Widow's Rock, the Hermit's Ice, the Drowned Man's Shard, the Old Man's Tumbler, since a rock that has been mined or lived on gets called what it looks like or who died on it.

Provisional designation gives the discovery name. Numbered asteroid gives the catalogue name. Comet name gives the discoverer's. Belter's name gives the miner's.

There is no gender option, since a rock has none.

The lists are original. The designation formats are the real conventions with random years and letters, the numbered and comet names use the surnames and worlds of the shared setting of this section and are not the names of any real or published asteroid or comet, and the belter's names are built for this page; a match with a novel, a series or a game would be chance, and a name intended for commercial use should be searched first.

For the belt as a whole, the star system page; for the world the rock falls on, the planet name page; for the miners' outpost on it, the space colony page; for the ship that hauls the ore, the starship name page; and for the pirates who hide in the belt, the space pirate page.

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