Schelte J. Bus

Schelte John "Bobby" Bus (born 1956) is an Associate Astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy and Support Astronomer at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility IRTF. He received his B.S. from Caltech in 1979, and was awarded his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999.

Bus has been an astronomer for many years. He discovered periodic comet 87P/Bus in 1981. In addition, Bus has discovered or co-discovered over a thousand asteroids, including an Apollo asteroid, 2135 Aristaeus, which will come within 5 Gm (3 million mi, 13 Earth-Moon distances) of the Earth on 30 March 2147; an Amor asteroid; and more than 40 Trojan asteroids. The first of these was 3240 Laocoon, which he co-discovered with Eleanor F. Helin. Bus was also the discoverer of asteroids 5020 Asimov and 4923 Clarke, named after two Science Fiction writers.

Asteroid 3254 Bus, which was discovered in 1982 by Edward L. G. Bowell, was named in his honor.

With MIT's Richard P. Binzel, he further added to the knowledge about main-belt asteroids in a lightwave survey published in 2003. This project was known as Small Main-belt Asteroid Spectroscopic Survey, Phase II or SMASSII, which built on a previous survey of the main-belt asteroids. The visible-wavelength (0.435-0.925 micrometre) spectra data was gathered between August 1993 and March 1999.

During his studies, he worked under the supervision of Eugene Shoemaker.