(9248) Sauer = 4593 P-L
Discovered 1960 Sept. 24 by C. J. van Houten and I. van Houten-Groeneveld on Palomar Schmidt plates taken by T. Gehrels.
Named in honor of Carl G. Sauer, Jr., a principal flight mechanics engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Since 1952, when he began work at JPL, Carl has been a leader in the development of the analysis tools used for designing the ballistic and low-thrust spacecraft missions that explore the solar system. His work has included mission designs for advanced spacecraft propulsion systems, including solar electric ion propulsion, nuclear propulsion, and solar sailing. His data base of potential spacecraft trajectories to hundreds of comets and asteroids is an invaluable resource for mission design work at JPL.