A third-year student at the University of Pretoria (UP) has been provisionally credited with the detection of an asteroid. Twenty-year-old Rorisang Mahomo, who hails from Lesotho, has had her discovery catalogued in the database of the Minor Planet Centre (MPC) of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

Mahomo said that the news had left her “truly happy and in shock”. Her discovery has been provisionally designated as Main Belt Asteroid 2023 QY50. Confirmation of her discovery will require further observations by astronomers, spread out over the next three to five years. Once her discovery has been confirmed, she will be allowed to rename the asteroid.

The striking thing is that Mahomo is not an astronomy or even a science student. She is actually studying business management. Astronomy is her hobby. She is a member of the UP student-led Blue Crane Space (BCS) society.   

BCS is a participant in the International Astronomical Search Collaboration (IASC) Asteroid Search initiative. The IASC provides high-resolution astronomical images, and the software to analyse them, to “citizen scientists”, so that they can search the images for objects that could be asteroids. It was while engaged in such a search, on September 2 last year, that Mahomo made her discovery. The official crediting of it, however, came only in October this year.

“It took me a whole minute to process the news; thinking of how big of a deal this was and that I had actually contributed to space science and created new research for scientists,” she said. “I am truly honoured and overwhelmed. Not only have I made myself and my family proud, but the nation of Lesotho, too.”

The MPC is based at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in the US State of Massachusetts. Although an IAU initiative, it is funded by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa). The IASC Asteroid Search is an initiative of Nasa’s Planetary Defence programme, intended to protect the Earth from catastrophic asteroid impacts.