Named in honor of Valentina Vladimirovna Prokof’eva (1929– ), prominent astrophysicist at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, a pioneer in the use of television photometry in astronomy and one of the authors of the monograph Televisionnaya Astronomiya, published in Russian in 1974 and 1984. She devised methods for receiving and calibrating television photometric data from such objects as galaxies, binaries, major and minor planets, comets and artificial satellites. Prokof’eva has obtained significant results in the interpretation of the blue clearings on Mars, nonradial pulsations of red giants, the components of symbiotic stars, and periodic light variations of the x-ray source V1055 Ori. She discovered multiple periodicities in light curves of a number of minor planets and interpreted them as a consequence of their duplicity and rotation of their components. (M 25231) _ _.