An asteroid now carries the name of Amalia Ercoli Finzi

The International Astronomical Union acknowledges the important contributions by the mother of the Rosetta mission

Starting today, asteroid 24890 (1996 XV32) carries the name of Amalia Ercoli Finzi, Italy’s first woman to graduate in aeronautical engineering and honorary professor at the Politecnico di Milano.

This comes as an acknowledgement on behalf of the International Astronomical Union of the work carried out by Prof. Finzi for the international scientific community in the field of space flight mechanics and space mission planning and in honour of her fundamental contribution to the Rosetta comet exploration mission.

24890 Amaliafinzi is an asteroid which can be found dashing through the area between the orbital trajectories of Mars and Jupiter, at an average distance from the Sun of over 400 million km. A year on the 24890 Amaliafinzi asteroid takes roughly five of our earth years. It was first discovered in 1996 by the Italian astronomers Maura Tombelli and Claudio Casacci from the National Astrophysics Institute’s astronomical observatory, located at the Cima Ekar (Italy).

Here are the details of the Amaliafinzi asteroid: