Malala Yousufzai honoured again, now in space

It is heartening that a Nasa scientist has decided to name an asteroid that she discovered between Mars and Jupiter after Malala Yousufzai, as the Pakistani Nobel laureate will then join a club that includes all four Beatles, Rafael Nadal, Lewis Carroll, Karl Marx and Charlotte Brontë, and some 15,000 others, famous and not-so. This is without doubt her biggest honour so far, as it is 4 km in diameter — definitely dwarfing the 66-mm Nobel medal — even if she can only see it through a powerful telescope that can ‘see’ cosmic objects via emitted heat. But, in celestial terms, the asteroid is rather diminutive, like the peace activist herself. However, the chunk of cosmic detritus differs from the feisty crusader by virtue of being rather predictable, going round the sun every fiveand-a-half years, on the same path.

Ironically, had the person Asteroid 316201 has now been named after also been so predictable, she would never have embarked on the incredible path that shot her into international limelight in the first place and got her this permanent place in the firmament. Presumably, her opponents back home in Swat Valley would probably prefer Malala herself to also be invisible to the naked eye like the heavenly body that bears her moniker, zipping around endlessly on the asteroid belt, million of miles away from Earth.