2980 Cameron, provisionally designated 1981 EU17, is a main-belt asteroid discovered by prolific American astronomer Schelte Bus at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia, on March 2, 1981.
It orbits the Sun every 4.11 years at a distance of 2.1–3.0 AU.
[1] The asteroid was named after astrophysicist and cosmogonist Alastair G. W. Cameron (1925–2005), who was associate director for theoretical astrophysics at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
He was an early advocate of the concepts of a turbulent accretion disk solar nebula, and of the origin of the Moon by a giant impact on the proto-Earth.
He also studied the nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, and the cosmic abundances of nuclides.