(300909) Kenthompson Main-belt Asteroid
Discovered on 30 January 2008 by Glinos, T., Levy, D. H. at Vail-Jarnac.
Kenneth Lane Thompson (b. 1943) is a computer scientist and winner of the Turing, Hamming Medal, National Medal of Technology and Japan Prize awards. He created the B programming language, the UTF-8 character encoding and the Belle chess machine, and was co-creator of the UNIX and Plan 9 operating systems.Naming citation (20120207/MPCPages.arc), IAU / Minor Planet Center, via NASA/JPL
Where Kenthompson is today
Seen from above the solar system on 2026-10-14: Kenthompson is 3.41 au from the Sun and 4.12 au from Earth. Computed from JPL's orbital elements.
Facts
| Number | 300909 |
| Provisional designation | 2008 BZ45 |
| Orbit class | Main-belt Asteroid |
| Absolute magnitude (H) | 15.82 |
| Orbital period | 5.62 years |
| Semi-major axis | 3.16 au |
| Perihelion – aphelion | 2.91 – 3.41 au |
| Eccentricity | 0.0802 |
| Inclination | 9.63° |
| Closest distance between its orbit and Earth's (MOID) | 1.93 au |
Data: NASA/JPL Small-Body Database and the IAU Minor Planet Center.
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