[deepspace] Re: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry-01.txt

[Marshall Eubanks <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Sep 5, 2026 at 11:55 PM Alejandro Acosta <
[e-mail]> wrote:

> Hi Erik,
>
>   You're totally right, and I actually agree.
>
>   IANA shouldn't be carrying that weight when the IAU already does the
> job. The draft is definitely too long and over-engineered right now (I
> wanted to do a good job and I overworked it). My main goal was just to flag
> that Deepspace/TIPTOP will eventually need an "ISO 3166 equivalent" for
> celestial objects and neither IANA nor the IETF need to do it.
>
>   Deferring to the IAU is definitely the right way to go. If some
> discussion happen I’ll trim down the draft big time for the next version
> and remove the unnecessary IANA overhead.
>

Yes, I agree to this, but it should say "deferred to the IAU and the MPC."

The Minor Planet Center (MPC), located at the Harvard- Smithsonian  Center
for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has partial responsibility
for asteroid naming and so we are deferring to both the IAU and the MPC.

More than you may want to know:

Asteroids (including new dwarf planets) typically have at least 2 or 3
names after a while, and they get those names through a three-step process
managed by the Minor Planet Center (MPC, in Cambridge, Mass) and the
International Astronomical Union (IAU).

- first there is a Provisional Designation (Temporary Code) from the MPC,
which encodes the time of discovery, and can last for indefinitely. This is
a name like 2024 YR4. Most asteroids with only provisional designations are
technically "lost' (they were observed briefly and we don't know where they
are good enough to find them again) and so they can get more than one
provisional designations. There is an active amateur community that tries
to link these multiple findings, which typically greatly improve the
orbits.

- Once the orbit is determined well enough, the asteroid is given
a  permanent serial number.This number goes in exact order of how the
orbits are confirmed, starting with (1) for Ceres. (The parenthesis used to
be part of the serial number, so (433) Eros, but not everyone follows that
convention now.)

It is highly unlikely that a spacecraft will rendezvous with an asteroid
that doesn't have a good enough orbit to get a permanent number - how could
it find it?

Once it gets a number, it can be named by the discoverer (but they can't
name an asteroid after themselves*). That has be approved by the IAU.
This can take a while - the lowest numbered asteroid without a permanent
name right now is (4596) 1981 QB.

These names are generally supposed to be of people, places or things
relevant to astronomy. There is something of a convention lately of having
missions give mission appropriate names for their targets, assuming they
don't already have a name. So, the target of the Osiris REx mission was
originally  1999 RQ36, then it was given the number 101955, and finally it
was named Bennu (a minor Egyptian deity) after a student competition.

Comet names are similar except that they have a prefix, and they are named
after their discoverer - thus, 1P/Halley (Halley's Comet), the first (1)
Periodic (P) comet, which was observed many times over millennia, and was
named after Halley because he figured out these appearances every 76 years
were actually the same comet.

Note that names can include spaces and special characters - when
1I/'Oumuamua (originally C/2017 U1) was first given that name there were a
lot of complaints about that single quote breaking people's software.

Finally, most newly discovered bodies are given a tag early on, which
disappear once the discovery seems real enough to give it a provisional
designation. Normally, these ids are never seen outside the asteroid
community, but there is one major exception:

The IAU and the MPC resolutely refuse to name artificial hardware (AKA
"artsats"), and sometime there is doubt about whether a new discovery is an
asteroid or an artsat. That is the case for "Sar2901," which is a possible
"miniMoon" (every few decades it does a loop around the Earth-Moon system,
which it is in the process of doing right now for more or less the rest of
this year).

Now, these miniMoons could be good target for resource extraction, as they
are easy to get to, but that also means that they could be artsats from
lunar mission. For Sar2901, thus seems likely enough that the MPC has
refused to give it a provisional name, as they describe here

https://www.minorplanetcenter.net/mpec/K26/K26R09.html

I speculated, based on data then available, that Sar2901 could be the panel
ejected by the Apollo 13 SM explosions, and that got picked up in a few
places.

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-mini-moon-sar2901-a-lost-panel-from-apollo-13-d86f822a595d

This article is fairly accurate, but it has been overtaken by events. Now,
with more by still really not enough data, 1971 is disfavored, but Luna 5
or Ranger 9 are still possibilities.

Sar2901 will have another perigee in November, but if the data then doesn't
resolve this, we'll be stuck with that name for years, probably until July
of 2037 (its next relatively close approach).

Regards
Marshall

* Or their pets. There is a famous counterexample, (2309) Mr. Spock, which
the IAU thought was being named after the Star Trek character, but was
actually named after the observatory cat.


>   Thanks for the catch!
>
>
> Best,
>
> Alejandro Acosta,
>
>
>
> On 5/9/26 11:20 PM, Erik Kline wrote:
>
> Does IANA really need to be doing this?
>
> For RFC 9179 S2.1 (
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9179#section-2.1) they just
> defer to the IAU:
>
> 2.1.  Frame of Reference
>
>    The frame of reference ('reference-frame') defines what the location
>    values refer to and their meaning.  The referred-to object can be any
>    astronomical body.  It could be a planet such as Earth or Mars, a
>    moon such as Enceladus, an asteroid such as Ceres, or even a comet
>    such as 1P/Halley.  This value is specified in 'astronomical-body'
>    and is defined by the International Astronomical Union
>    <http://www.iau.org>.  The default 'astronomical-body' value is
>    'earth'.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 27, 2026 at 11:47 PM Alejandro Acosta <
> [e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> Hello group,
>>   I just submitted my first draft (yes, 01, sorry, I screwed it up with
>> the 00 version).
>>   Any comments, feedback, or suggestions  are highly welcome.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Alejandro
>>
>>
>> -------- Forwarded Message --------
>> Subject: New Version Notification for
>> draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry-01.txt
>> Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:24:38 -0700
>> From: [e-mail]
>> To: Alejandro Acosra <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>,
>> Alejandro Acosta <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
>>
>> A new version of Internet-Draft
>> draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry-01.txt has been
>> successfully
>> submitted by Alejandro Acosta and posted to the
>> IETF repository.
>>
>> Name: draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry
>> Revision: 01
>> Title: Defining a Celestial Bodies Registry for Deep Space Internet
>> Addressing
>> Date: 2026-08-27
>> Group: Individual Submission
>> Pages: 5
>> URL:
>> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry-01.txt
>> Status:
>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry/
>> HTML:
>> https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry-01.html
>> HTMLized:
>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry
>> Diff:
>> https://author-tools.ietf.org/iddiff?url2=draft-acosta-deepspace-celestial-bodies-registry-01
>>
>> Abstract:
>>
>> This document proposes the creation of a formalized registry for
>> celestial bodies within the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
>> (IANA) to support routing and address allocation in deep space
>> networks. As internet architecture expands to interplanetary scales,
>> routing protocols rely on hierarchical aggregation based on planetary
>> and celestial entities. However, the IETF currently lacks a
>> standardized taxonomical framework or mapping mechanism to uniquely
>> identify these entities. This document outlines the requirements for
>> establishing such a registry, suggests leveraging definitions from
>> the International Astronomical Union (IAU), and discusses the
>> integration of these identifiers into the deep space routing
>> architecture.
>>
>>
>>
>> The IETF Secretariat
>>
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