3325 TARDIS
asteroid
3325 TARDIS (provisional designation: 1984 JZ) is a dark Alauda asteroid from the outer region of the asteroid belt, approximately 29 kilometers (18 miles) in diameter. It was discovered on 3 May 1984, by American astronomer Brian Skiff at Lowell's Anderson Mesa Station, Arizona, in the United States. The asteroid was named TARDIS, after the fictional time machine and spacecraft from the science fiction television series Doctor Who.
Orbit and classification
TARDIS is a member of the Alauda family (902), a large family of typically bright carbonaceous asteroids and named after its parent body, 702 Alauda.
It orbits the Sun in the outer main-belt at a distance of 3.1–3.2 AU once every 5 years and 8 months (2,076 days). Its orbit has an eccentricity of 0.01 and an inclination of 22° with respect to the ecliptic. In 1958 it was first identified as 1958 VB1 at the Goethe Link Observatory, extending the body's observation arc by 26 years prior to its official discovery at Anderson Mesa.
Naming
It is named after the acronym TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space), the space and time travel vehicle used by the Doctor in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The fictional time machine looks like a police telephone box from mid-twentieth century Britain. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 11 March 1990 (M.P.C. 16041).
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q565483. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1958 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “3325 TARDIS” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.