Asteroid 37452 Spirit was discovered on September 24, 1960 by Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld, Cornelis Johannes van Houten, and Tom Gehrels. The asteroid was spotted by examining photographic plates of images taken by telescopes at the Palomar Observatory. 37452 Spirit is part of a small group of asteroids that make up the Hilda family, located between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroids share a 3:2 orbital resonance with Jupiter, meaning that for every 2 orbits Jupiter completes around the Sun, the asteroids will complete 3 orbits. It has a diameter of approximately 4–9 km (2.5–6 mi) and takes about 7.9 years to orbit the Sun. The asteroid's orbit does not cross the path of any of the planets and therefore will not be pulled out of orbit by Jupiter's gravitational field. As a result of this, it's likely that the asteroid will remain in a stable orbit for thousands of years.
On October 11, 2004, following a proposal by van Houten-Groeneveld in 2002 it was renamed in honour of the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.
Famous quotes containing the word spirit:
“We soon saw, as he saw, that he was not to be pardoned or rescued by men. That would have been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharp’s rifle, when he had taken up the sword of the spirit,—the sword with which he has really won his greatest and most memorable victories. Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)