How Bob McDonald goes where no Canadian has gone before

There’s nothing quirky about it, if there’s a man who deserves to wear the Order of Canada, it’s Bob McDonald. The longtime top CBC science correspondent was and is for many Canadian children, synonymous with science and learning.

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How else do you come to possess 13 honorary degrees, medals from NSERC and The Royal Society of Canada, and a Gemini?

How, in the name of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, do you get an honest to goodness space-borne asteroid named after you?

A good Victoria boy, McDonald was sailing around Vancouver Island when he got the news he was also somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, as the story goes.

“I almost fell overboard,” he told the national broadcaster in 2014. “It’s huge for me. As a little kid, I dreamt about going into space, being out there. That hasn’t quite happened yet, so having an object named after me is almost as good.”

As a main belt asteroid, Bobmcdonald is a “leftover planetary building block that never accreted enough material to become” a planet, according to Harvard University (which some pretty smart Canadians have attended). “They are therefore keys to understanding how the Solar System formed and evolved.”

Royal Astronomical Society of Canada metadata indicate the asteroid is designated 2006 XN67, a reference to its discovery on Dec. 12, 2006 by National Research Council observer David Balam using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in the observatory constellation high above the clouds on Maunakea on Hawaii’s Big Island. 

McDonald was named an Officer in the Order of Canada in 2011. The Governor General’s website notes he became one of the country’s most respected science journalists despite having no formal university education (a baker’s dozen honorary degrees don’t count — nor do McDonald’s brace of honorary college diplomas).

Instead, McDonald made his name as a science communicator starting at the Ontario Science Centre in the 1970s, according to a piece the CBC published in 2022 on the occasion of his 30th anniversary with the also-award-winning CBC Radio science mainstay Quirks & Quarks. He was first invited to appear on CBC Radio during a climate-themed series on Ideas called Running Hot and Cold in 1978.

Quirks & Quarks was driven by breaking science news each week. In his first episode, McDonald interviewed researchers about topics as disparate as the Hubble Space Telescope’s challenges, and whether dental equipment could spread AIDS.

“After three decades of hosting Quirks, I still enjoy going to work every week,” he said in a column, also from 2022. “The subject matter is always new, interesting and it keeps me abreast of where we are in our understanding of the fundamental process that governs the universe, and therefore our lives.”

Not to mention, inspiring generations of Canadians to look up and imagine where they might make their own mark among the stars.

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