19th Largest Asteroid, 48 Doris

48 Doris is a large main belt asteroid, with a diameter of around 222 km. Doris is the 19th largest asteroid currently known.

Discovery

Doris was discovered by Hermann Goldschmidt on September 19, 1857 from his balcony in Paris.

Naming

To find a name for the asteroid, Jacques Babinet of the Academy of Sciences created a shortlist and asked the geologist Élie de Beaumont to make the selection. De Beaumont chose Doris, after an Oceanid in Greek mythology.

Doris, an Oceanid, was a sea nymph in Greek mythology, whose name represented the bounty of the sea. She was the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys and the wife of Nereus. She was also aunt to Atlas, the titan who was made to carry the sky upon his shoulders, whose mother Clymene was a sister of Doris.

Stats

Diameter (mean): 221.8 km
Aphelion: 3.343 AU
Perihelion: 2.88 AU
Semi-major axis: 3.114 AU
Orbital Period: 5.49 years
Rotation period: 11.89 hrs
Date discovered: 1857.9.19
Class: C
Type: Main-belt Asteroid
(data from JPL Small-Body Database)

Star Occultation

An occultation (SAO 118832) on March 19, 1981, suggested a diameter of 219±25 km for Doris.

Observations of an occultation (SAO 161849) on October 14, 1999, using four well-placed chords, indicate an ellipsoid of 278×142 km and that Doris is an extremely irregular shaped object.