Ding Shushan, 17, a senior middle school girl, says she takes her new semester as another waveless battle to vie for college entrance exam two years away.

But Ding's asteroid discovery Aug. 31, on the eve of the new semester, has made the quiet-scholarly girl a talk topic in the school, as she is now the second female amateur astronomer in the world who has spotted a fast moving space object, or FMO.

Ding spotted at noon Wednesday a short streak of light in a real-time star chart, while going over telescope pictures on the Internet for the University of Arizona's Spacewatch FMO project. "My instinct told me it's a new FMO," Ding acknowledged, "so I submitted the image to Spacewatch as a FMO candidate and, two hours later, I got an E-mail from the FMO project to congratulate my discovery."

In late 2003, the Arizona-based Spacewatch group started enlisting public volunteers to help search its on-line images for FMO, by logging onto a website and downloading images taken by a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, the United States. The FMO Project volunteers have so far made 26 confirme1d asteroid discoveries.