Named in honor of David John Asher (1966– ), researcher on the dynamics of the small bodies in the solar system. Born in Scotland, Asher took degrees at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Edinburgh. Following this, he took the words of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to heart — “With a degree in maths, and another in astrophysics, it was either that or back to the dole queue on Monday” — and moved to Australia, where he spent two years at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. He is currently working at the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan. (M 29147) _ _.