Picard is asteroid #178008 and also known as 2006 QQ137. Picard was discovered by the French engineer and amateur astronomer Bernard Christophe at the Saint-Sulpice Observatory. Picard’s orbit is characterized by a semi-major axis of 3.12 Astronomical Units, an eccentricity of 0.31, a period of revolution of 2 016 days, and an inclination of 14.8 degrees.

A crater on the front of the Moon is also named Picard. This crater is located east of the crater Yerkes and south of the crater Peirce. These are all within the Mare Crisium. The crater Picard is named after the French astronomer Jean Picard, who lived from 1620 until 1682 and was the first to measure the length of one degree of a meridian arc. Thus he was one of the founders of geodesy.

Picard is a frequent French surname. So several renowned people with different professions exist with this name. The meaning of this name is a person from Picardy, which is a historical region and cultural area in France. The people there speak an own Picard language, which is related with French, but the dispute whether it is only a French dialect is by linguists usually decided in favor of a language on its own.

The asteroid Picard is named after a Claude Picard, but not the Canadian painter, who seems to be more famous. The Picard in question here is a French engineer and astronomer and lived from 1942 until 2008. He had graduated from a French elite university (École nationale supérieure d’arts et métiers). He joined the Societé Astronomique de France in 2000. The Societé Astronomique de France is a non-profit organization supporting the development of astronomy. Claude Picard created the Commission Cosmologie in the Societé Astronomique de France in 2001 and later became the president of this commission. The discoverer (Bernard Christophe) of the asteroid Picard had joined too. He was impressed by Claude Picard’s technical competence and kindness. This is what the official naming citation and the French part of the Wikipedia know about him. Other sources don’t know him. So nothing else than these tiny pieces of information are known on him publicly.

The less is known publicly, the less has to be considered in finding really possible meanings for astrological interpretations. So such a lack of information is actually good news. Picard definitely represents people with the name Picard and hints to the Picard language. Representing namesakes of the asteroid is self-evidently something, which is the task of every asteroid. The people from the Picardy region could be represented by the asteroid Picard too. Other French people usually portray the people from the Picardy region as clumsy and uneducated. They are the French version of the American hillbillies. I had of course hoped that Claude Picard could have been a detour in order to name the asteroid #178008 after the captain of the spaceship Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard. I thought that there is perhaps no asteroid Kirk (at least not yet) because asteroid Picard should represent the captain of the Enterprise. But the only connection seems to be that Jean-Luc Picard is the most famous of the namesakes of the asteroid Picard. The asteroid was discovered after this character became famous, so the asteroid self-evidently has the task to represent Captain Picard too. Additional meanings can’t be derived from this circumstance alone. A closer connection or experiences with a huge amount of astrological data could justify this, but nothing else.