How are asteroids named? While comets are named after their discoverers (think of the Halley comet), asteroids are named by their discoverers. Asteroids are also given a number, so that the first one to be discovered was 1 Ceres (now classified as a dwarf planet, like Pluto), followed by 2 Pallas, 3 Juno and so on. Soon the Graeco-Roman pantheon was scraped to the bottom, and discoverers had to resort to names of places or famous people. It pretty much went downhill from those pioneering times, so that now we have to put up with 2309 Mr. Spock, 9007 James Bond and 14238 d'Artagnan. On the other hand we must admit that some name-number combinations are pretty clever, like 8080 Intel (for the non-geeks among you, the 8080 was an early microprocessor by Intel).

If we look through this long list of names, we can find a lot of Europe. For instance, many member countries of the EU are represented. Here are a few, randomly chosen and listed in order of discovery: 241 Germania, 434 Hungaria, 477 Italia, 1541 Estonia, 1656 Suomi (Finland), 1807 Slovakia, 2575 Bulgaria, 2713 Luxembourg, 3933 Portugal and 9674 Slovenija. Needless to say there's also 52 Europa, although the name refers to the mythological Greek princess rather than to the continent.

What about European cities? Well, there's plenty, so we'll limit ourselves to a few capitals: 21 Lutetia (Paris in Latin), 472 Roma, 787 Moskva, 1495 Helsinki, 2367 Praha, 2689 Bruxelles, 8837 London, 10552 Stockholm and 14967 Madrid.

What if we could embark on an interplanetary InterRail journey (Inter... Rocket?) to visit all these places? I hate to say this, but I'm afraid it would get pretty boring after a while. Asteroids are big rocks floating in space, like 433 Eros pictured below (photo NASA). After you have seen a few of them, you will probably lose interest. Unless it's your job to study them, in which case you'll never get bored, but most of us do something else for a living.

Asteroid 433 Eros

Anyway, if you really want to plan such a journey, be sure not to miss a European symbol of adventure, discovery, friendship and learning: asteroid 7907 Erasmus!