Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld

Dutch astronomer Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld (1921-2015)
Credit: Leiden Observatory

Dutch astronomer Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld was born in October 1921 in Berlin, Germany and studied at the University of Heidelberg. Van Houten-Groeneveld spent a majority of her life finding and identifying asteroids. This may sound like a simple task, but finding asteroids is actually pretty difficult since they are incredibly dark - asteroids have very low albedos, as they don't reflect light very well. This fact puts into perspective the remarkable work that van Houten-Groeneveld completed in her lifetime. In 1952, van Houten-Groeneveld helped Gerard Kuiper (from whom the Kuiper belt gets its name) with his McDonald-survey of Minor Planets. A few years later, in 1957, she moved on to Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands where she worked on the orbits of the comets used by Jan Oort (for whom the Oort Cloud is named) in his study of their distribution. 

In 1960, van Houten-Groeneveld began work on the Palomar-Leiden survey with collaborators Cornelis Johannes van Houten (her husband) and Tom Gehrels (a Dutch-American astronomer), among others. In this survey, Gehrels used the 48-inch Schmidt telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California to take images of the night sky, and then he would send the photographic plates to the van Houtens at Leiden Observatory, who would analyze them for new asteroids. Talk about international collaboration! According to the Minor Planet Center, the trio discovered 4637 asteroids, with one of them being the asteroid 7040 Harwood, which they named after notable astronomer Margaret Harwood. 

Ingrid van Houten-Groeneveld in front of her photographic plate collection in Heidelberg, Germany.
Credit: Research Institute Leiden Observatory

Van Houten-Groeneveld also published numerous papers on the photometric properties of asteroids and comets throughout her lifetime. [Note: photometry is the measurement of the intensity of an object's electromagnetic radiation - i.e. a measure of an object's brightness]. Seeing as her life's work was focused on the discovery of asteroids, it is only fitting that the asteroid 1674 Groeneveld is named in her honor.