site. The Heaven's Gate cult was so convinced that the additional object was a spaceship coming to take them away from Earth that they committed mass suicide. The Mars-crosser asteroid 3255 Tholen, discovered by Edward Bowell in 1980, is named after David Tholen. Personal interests David Tholen and Roy Tucker, co-discovers of 99942 Apophis, are both fans of the TV series Stargate SG-1, which influenced the naming of the asteroid. The show's most persistent villain is "Apophis", an alien also named for the Egyptian god. "We considered a number of names, but 'Apophis' kept floating to the top," says Tucker. "Apophis was a very fitting name for not only because of its threatening nature, but also because of its evolution from an Aten asteroid to an Apollo asteroid during the 2029 encounter.". Tholen is a fan of the University of Kansas Jayhawks college basketball team and the Kansas City Royals Major League Baseball team. He also plays clarinet and bass clarinet for the Honolulu Community Concert Band and the Oahu Community Orchestra. He is also a user of the OS/2, Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac OS operating systems. Tholen frequently posts to various Usenet groups using the alias tholen@antispam.ham. List of discovered minor planets See also Asteroid spectral types References External links Homepage Tholen responds to faked images 1955 births American astronomers Discoverers of asteroids Living people Planetary scientists University of Arizona alumni University of Hawaiʻi faculty