National Science Foundation Media contact: Lee Herring, (703)
306-1070, firstname.lastname@example.org Program contact: Joe
Stewart, (703) 306-1613, email@example.com NSF PR 98-79 November
20, 1998 High School Students Discover Distant Asteroid Using
NSF Telescope and High school students have discovered a
previously unidentified celestial object in the Kuiper Belt
using images from the National Science Foundation's (NSF)
4-meter Blanco Telescope in Chile. Heather McCurdy, Miriam
Gustafson and George Peterson of Northfield Mount Hermon School
in Northfield, Massachusetts, one of six Asteroid Search Teams
at the school participating in NSF's innovative Hands-On
Universe Program, found and verified the distant object. It was
approximately 100 miles in diameter and now is officially called
1998 FS144. Astronomy teacher Hughes Pack directed the students'
search of computer images provided by the Berkeley National
Lab's Supernova Cosmology Program. A collaborating team, Stacey
Hinds and Angel Birchard, students fr