Jane Luu
Jane X. Luu (* as Luu Le Hang, 1963 in Saigon, South Vietnam ) is a Vietnamese- American astronomer.
Luu, whose father worked as a translator for the U.S. Army in Vietnam, arrived in 1975 as a refugee in the United States. They first lived in Kentucky and in 1976 in Southern California. Luu studied astronomy at Stanford University and received her bachelor's degree in 1984. She continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology continues where it was awarded his doctorate in 1990 with David C. Jewitt (Physical Studies of Primitive Solar System Bodies ). For her PhD, she worked mainly at the University of Hawaii, where in 1988 Jewitt was changed. They made there in the Mauna Kea Observatory with CCD cameras on August 30, 1992 in decisive discovery of an object of Kuiper Belt.
It was after graduating from Harvard Smithsonian Center and 1992/93 Hubble Fellow at Berkeley and Stanford, and in 1994 Assistant Professor at Harvard University. After spending some time (1998 to 2002) at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, she returned to the U.S. and worked as a senior scientist at Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There she is primarily concerned with musical instruments. She is the Origin of the Solar System Committee of NASA and in various astronomical bodies that are responsible for the allocation of observing time on telescopes, for example, the Planetary Science Decadal Survey (2013-2022) of the National Academy of Sciences.
Together with David C. Jewitt they discovered the first Kuiper belt object 1992 QB1, which they named after a character in the novels of John le Carré Smiley. In the years that she discovered with Jewitt and many more other Kuiper Belt objects ( up to 1996 twenty-one ).
She is married to the astronomer Ronnie Hoogerwerf, whom she met in Leiden, and has a daughter. As a hobby she plays the cello and travels, for example, it was right after the opening of the border in 1986 in Tibet.
The asteroid ( 5430 ) Luu is named in her honor.